


the shape of true things

by newsbypostcard



Series: [tma] scottish cabin chronicles [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Asexual Character, Background Basira Hussain/Daisy Tonner, Humanity, Love Confessions, M/M, Monstrosity, Mutual Pining, Repression, Road Trips, Running from the law, Scottish Cabin, Telepathy, The Lonely - Freeform, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-06-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:54:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22093657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: Post-MAG 159:Elias doesn't stop them. Nobody does.Jon mulls this over stood in Martin's meagre flat. It's small, as expected: a single room but for a bathroom near the back. Jon watches Martin move around, hand clasped around a chair. They'd let go sometime after scrambling out of the taxi, when Martin had needed to fish in his pockets for keys. Jon feels oddly bereft without his grip. He's trying not to show it. It's strange to him, all of this. He usually likes his personal space.He chalks it up to the Lonely. Some aspect of it still swimming in his blood, tugging at his bones, wanting to lure him back in. He watches Martin for some signal that he feels it too. The flat doesn't help matters—rife with a bachelor's untidiness, otherwise spartan. Martin's bed sits nestled in the back corner, no space wasted with access to both sides. It feels very intimate to be seeing all this. Jon should have pulled Martin out of this sooner, long before now.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Series: [tma] scottish cabin chronicles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1774960
Comments: 91
Kudos: 631





	1. Falcon, No Falconer

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for canon-typical horrors like major depression, discussion of recent suicidal ideation, inability to express one's feelings (and other miscommunications), becoming something which is not quite human, childhood neglect, reference to scars (physical and emotional), and the incredibly weird boundaries associated with effective telepathy. 
> 
> Thanks to [Kathy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anaeolist) and [Mari](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung), whose discussions helped develop my ideas on these characters and world considerably. Thanks also to [Grace](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gracelesso) for being my occasional UK consultant; all mistakes are emphatically my own.
> 
> This will be three chapters (eta: plus an epilogue). Thank you very much for reading.

  


  


***

  


  


Jon pulls Martin out of the Lonely, their hands entwined, and thinks: How can he love someone he barely knows?

  


  


Back in the Archives, Basira speaks first—"Get out," said shortly, her back turned, pistol in hand. As Basira assesses the carnage, Jon wonders what she's been touched by; is abruptly grateful he doesn't know. 

"Basira."

Basira inclines her head in their direction only minutely. "They'll be here soon."

"Who?" asks Martin. Jon knows Martin's there because he's still got his hand, but it's a relief to hear his voice, broken as it is. The echo has left it, so he must be real.

"I'll handle it," says Basira.

"Daisy…?"

"Yeah." Her back is still turned. "That's a good point. She might—I don't know. Old habits and all." Basira's laugh rings as hollow as her words. "You're no safer from her than from Section. Not until I find her."

Martin's shoulders relax, but Jon's brow furrows. His eyes lock on the gun still in her hand. 

"It's ballsy," Basira says, sounding more like herself. "She'd see it as a betrayal, won't expect it." She turns to look at them properly, and Jon sees something—a compulsion to keep staring—flash in her eyes and then disappear. Now Basira flits her gaze between them, to where their hands stay entwined, and frowns. "Alright," she says, sliding the safetied pistol into the waistband of her jeans. "Simplifies matters, I suppose. How do you feel about tartan?"

"No strong feelings," says Jon, as Martin says, "Washes me out."

"Fit right in, though, won't you?" she says to Martin. "Best you're not around when they get here. Last thing we need is you pinned for another murder."

"You called Section?" asks Jon.

"Needed the backup." Basira may not have been willing to kill Daisy herself, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't set up the conditions. "Should've been here by now."

"Traffic," Jon mutters. 

Basira shrugs, slides her hands into her pockets. A false facsimile of casual, dark circles under her eyes.

"Who... was murdered, exactly?" asks Martin.

"Those vampire hunters, for a start." Basira gestures behind her, but this is not the splattered gore of humanity. It is black and stringy, clinging to all. "Think they must've made a few academics into casualties on their way in. Someone called a Code 5; think the building's been evacuated now. You'll still probably want to go out through the tunnels. Think that's it for the Sasha-Thing, too." Her eyes fall to the nearest thread of sinew. "Hard to know for sure."

"Also," Jon says suddenly, "er—Peter Lukas."

"Oh?" says Basira, eyebrows raised.

" _Oh?_ " asks Martin.

"Yes," Jon says flatly. "It's a long story. Basira, did Elias pass through here?"

"No," she says slowly. "Should he have?"

"I saw him in the tunnels. I doubt he's finished with me, but—"

"Yeah," Martin says emptily. "I saw him too."

Elias isn't done with either one of them, then.

"Wonderful," Basira says dryly. She snatches a page off the nearest stack of paper not encrusted with gore. "Don't take your car," she instructs, pulling the cap off a pen with her teeth—a courageous act, given environmental conditions. "Don't take the train, either, not even partway. Borrow a car or steal one, doesn't matter, as long as it's not yours. No guarantee the Eye won't find you, but that's your problem, isn't it?"

"It certainly is," Jon mutters; Martin stifles a hysterical snicker.

"Don't take your phones or anything with a GPS tracker," says Basira. "If you stop at your flat, make it fast. Could be you'll be up there a while, mind you." She turns the map in their direction, pointing with her pen. "Off the A9, take the A95 at Granish, then the A941 just before Craigallachie. Turn southeast; follow the road until Hill, then hang left before Dufftown. Take the right fork at the end of the road; cross the river, then take an immediate left. Do _not_ take the bend in the road, but drive up the overgrown path into the hills." She straightens and moves to hand Jon the map, but after a moment's consideration gives it to Martin instead. "It's not much," she adds, rolling her eyes when Martin hands Jon the map at once, "but you'll be able to stash the car, walk to the town. You should be safe there from… Section, if that." She shrugs. "Bit of a daft precaution, under the circumstances."

Jon has questions about this place she's directing them to, but then abruptly has answers: a long weekend spent in the Highlands after a Section case had gone awry and Basira and Daisy had resorted to fucking it out after the cabin fever became unbearable. The beginning of something anchoring, if not quite beautiful. 

Daisy is gone now, given into monstrosity. Jon knows that, too.

It seems a bit fitting, if awfully unearned, to bring Martin there now. Two halves of a story played out across time, as orchestrated as anything else. Jon laughs weakly. He's not deserving of a happy ending; he'd thought the same in the Lonely, made breathless by the look Martin had given him. He'd wondered at the time if it was only the realm that made him think it, but the Lonely, after all, is shaped by true things. 

If there's one thing Jon's learned in the course of all this, it's that no one's guaranteed the outcome they've earned—in his case, a benefit.

There's less than three minutes before Section arrives.

"I need," Jon croaks, running a hand over cracked lips, "a few statements. To get me there, at least."

"You'll need more than that," says Basira, but Jon shakes his head.

"No, I'm—really, Martin, not that many."

Martin had been methodically stacking the nearest gore-free statements on top of one another with his free hand, the other still entwined with Jon's. Neither seems willing to let go. Jon thinks he won't be until they're free of this place, unless Martin insists or Jon needs it to drive.

Does Martin drive?

Jon doesn't know how a man who had come so close to disappearing thirty minutes ago looks so present now. 

"Three at most," Jon tells him softly.

"You're not quitting cold turkey," says Martin.

"I think I am."

"No," says Martin, solid as anything. "We'll wean you off if you must, but it's not…" He looks away, resumes his stacking. "You saw what it did to Daisy."

"I don't…" _Care_ , Jon almost says, but there's no time for an argument now. "Fine," he amends. Nothing says he has to read what they take. "What do you need from here?"

"Nothing."

"Martin."

"Really. Nothing." Those vivid green eyes meet his and Jon thinks again, wildly, _Tell me what you see._ "We haven't got time to amass the tapes—"

"I don't care." _Sod the bloody Archive_ , Jon thinks in a fit of savage abandon—then nearly staggers from a wave of recrimination, sourced from within him and without him. 

Well. That opens its own set of questions. 

"Basira," Jon asks. He's keen to get out of here, and now. "What do you…?"

"Just go." Basira has turned her back to them again, gaze focused back on the gore-splattered wall. "I'll handle it."

"You—"

"Make yourselves no longer my problem," Basira snaps. "That's what you can do."

As instructions go, it's clear enough. Martin seems to agree. "Need anything else?" Martin asks, and as Jon looks at the blood and the carnage and at Martin's fingers clenched in his, he thinks hysterically: _No._ He thinks, _This is all there is._

Jon shakes his head and looks to Basira; lets a thousand words die on his tongue. "Good luck," he says instead. "If you need anything..."

But Basira doesn't look at them, may not even hear them. Her eyes are fixed on Not-Sasha spattered on the walls.

They linger, watching Basira, both half-turned toward the door. But a flurry of noise announces Section upstairs and Jon pulls Martin into the tunnels, gaining distance from the Archives step by unsteady step, no small weight upon his conscience.

  


  


  


  


Elias doesn't stop them. Nobody does.

Jon mulls this over stood in Martin's meagre flat. It's small, as expected: a single room but for a bathroom near the back. Jon watches Martin move around, hand clasped around a chair. They'd let go sometime after scrambling out of the taxi, when Martin had needed to fish in his pockets for keys. Jon feels oddly bereft without his grip. He's trying not to show it. It's strange to him, all of this. He usually likes his personal space. 

He chalks it up to the Lonely. Some aspect of it still swimming in his blood, tugging at his bones, wanting to lure him back in. He watches Martin for some signal that he feels it too. The flat doesn't help matters—rife with a bachelor's untidiness, otherwise spartan. Martin's bed sits nestled in the back corner, no space wasted with access to both sides. 

The bedclothes are bundled untidily, unmade. The top blanket is a faded, bristly yellow—a likely relic of the '60s. It reminds Jon of his grandmother's linens, now shoved away in a storage unit he hasn't been to in years. If Jon were to press his nose to its hairs, he expects the blanket would smell musty and old. A comforter lies beneath it, pills blocking patterns into its fabric. A green plastic clock hangs on the wall, stuck at ten minutes to six. From the layer of dust, Jon assumes it's been out of battery for months. 

It feels very intimate to be seeing all this. Jon feels like he should apologize. He should have pulled Martin out of this sooner, long before now. He took Martin's brush-offs as an invitation to stay uninvolved, as he always does; old weaknesses leading him astray.

Martin had voiced mild embarrassment upon entry, but he seems to have forgotten it now. Jon watches him move with mute purpose around the flat. He hasn't spent significant time with Martin in almost a year, barely spent time with him outside the Archives before that—curry nights around the holidays and the occasional Friday drink, Jon begrudging of both. He is still learning Martin's differences. There are still, after all this time, moments of slope-shouldered deference in Martin's stance—but not here. Not now, even under Jon's watchful gaze. Martin moves swiftly, seeming unconcerned with appearances for the first time since Jon's known him, comfortable in the squalor of solitude. 

Martin stows clothing into a backpack in indiscriminate handfuls, then disappears around the corner. Jon follows automatically. He isn't sure why. The bathroom door was left open. If Jon knows anything—

(He knows too much. The answer of how he loves Martin had come to him as they'd sat in the cab: Jon knows Martin better than he thinks, has learned him even through Martin's avoidance, and his own. Jon knows Martin's heart, his thoughts, just by thinking of him; he's known them for years. An intrusion beyond reproach.)

—it's that there's no escape from the Entities so complete as what Martin's pretending. If Jon, of all people, wants Martin in close proximity, surely Martin must feel the same.

Surely, he must.

Jon was once a man of reason. But he was once just a man.

"I've got," Martin says distractedly as Jon comes into view, "a spare toothbrush." He reaches behind his bathroom mirror and brandishes it in the air, still in the package. 

Jon neither takes it nor dismisses it. Martin's words land with stellar force. Only three seating options exist in Martin's flat: one armchair by a lamp in the corner, two rickety wooden contraptions shoved under a small kitchen table. One of the chairs is laden with rags. There are four plates stacked optimistically in the cupboard; two mugs, three bowls, a teapot without cups. One pair of shoes beside the front door. One umbrella. One jacket on the hook. A single knife in the sink, crusted with peanut butter since God knows how long. 

An individually packaged toothbrush kept over the sink.

It wasn't bought in a set, but by itself to live there in hope—a beacon of optimism. In case Britain's loneliest man finds someone to bring home.

"Martin." Jon's voice has gone thin. He _feels_ insubstantial, brittle enough to break.

"I'm not doing this now." Martin has learned to be firm. He keeps his eyes averted, but the crack in his voice betrays him. He sets the spare toothbrush on the lip of the sink close to Jon. It's there, if he wants it. Jon wishes he'd said something better now; a common affliction. His mouth threatens to close over a thousand questions— _Why not now?_ , soon discarded, and more naively, _When?_ He knows the answer to neither by instinct, doesn't dig to find out. Martin has his secrets, he has his resolve. Right now both are stronger than Jon's.

"I just thought if you don't want to stop at yours," Martin says, voice level again, "we could just—" He meets Jon's eye. "We could just go. Or if—"

"No." Jon wishes he didn't know what Martin had been about to say, but it's enough to be able to stop him saying it. "I do—I don't, want to stop at mine. Yes." He nods curtly, puts conviction back in his posture. "Let's just go. We can buy—" He snatches the toothbrush up from the sink, backs away like a coward. "Everything but a toothbrush, along the way. We'll have to stop for petrol..."

"Yes," says Martin. He waves a tube of toothpaste absently in the air. "I only have the one—"

"Right."

"We can share. Or—"

"Yes."

"The petrol station—"

"Should have toothpaste. But I—"

"Or the town will."

"True enough."

Awkward silence falls. Neither one of them moves. Martin stows the toothpaste into a kit and steps swiftly out of the bathroom, not looking at Jon as he passes. 

Jon fights the instinct to pull him back. To what end? It's a one-room flat; Jon's not going to lose track of him here. They don't need the anchor now, they've seen the real world—stood on the sidewalk like children watching it pass by, getting dampened in the pissing rain.

Jon's never needed anything from anyone, before now.

"Martin," he says.

"We really should get going."

"You didn't answer my question."

Martin looks up, suddenly still. Jon knows abruptly that only two children came to Martin's eighth birthday party, and that both of those children lived in the garden flat downstairs. Their mother had seen Martin's cresting disappointment and taken pity on him, sent them out to play.

It wasn't Martin's fault. His parents' marriage had been falling apart. Martin's mother would have to move them somewhere else when her husband inevitably left; they'd barely get by on her salary alone. Perhaps a smaller town—Honiton would be fine. Martin's father had left with the only car days before, Christ knew when he'd be back. A three-hour affair felt too long to handle; ninety minutes was crossed out on the invitations to become an hour. The move would be easier without so many things, so gifts were discouraged. They lived out of the way, on the catchment area's edge, trapped on the other side of a motorway without sidewalks. No one ever knew how to get to that part of town without explicit directions, and Martin's mother had not provided them. There would be no lunch and no cake, so children should eat beforehand.

For a moment, Martin looks like the man such a childhood produced. As they stand in the white noise of quiet, Martin's gaze trails away. A flush blooms on his cheeks. Jon becomes aware of the teapot beside the hob—how Martin's fighting the urge to offer some, how a cup of tea came to define Martin's relationship with his mother. It could smooth things over, or win a bit of favour: a gesture of care and desire in one. 

Martin straightens his back, shoulders no longer rounded. The corporeal Lonely drops from the room. 

"You," Martin says plainly, "did not phrase it as a question."

Jon's not sure the last time he smiled. The effort feels to put cracks in his face. "I suppose not."

"Besides that, I answered it fine. You said, 'Tell me what you see,' and I said, 'Jon.'"

"That is... what happened."

"So if there's something else you want to know, just ask." Martin checks his watch—a decade-old relic, clunky and digital. Freckles smatter along Martin's arms, disappear into his shirtsleeves. He's grown the start of a beard in the last week or two—a patchy thing, barely worthy of the name. Jon fights the foreign impulse to smooth the ginger strands beside his ear and wonders vaguely if Martin's descended from vikings. 

"Actually, don't," says Martin. "We haven't got time. What's it to the Highlands, two days?"

"It—what?" Jon blinks. "It's ten hours."

"Is it really?"

"Barring any encounters with the Vast." Jon risks another smile, is surprised when it shakes. Statement weakness is setting in faster than expected. "You know how the countryside gets."

Martin squints at him, pained. "You can't... bring things into being, can you, Jon?"

"Oh, Christ. I hope not."

"Well," Martin says, zipping his backpack closed, "I'm not telling you to shut up, but do let's try to get out of London before invoking anything." He says it without bitterness, without wariness, without any sort of defense; only a gentle barb snagging on years-old tensions still left unaddressed. 

Jon used to be a man of reason. Whatever he is now scares Martin less than it should.

"Martin," Jon says. The plaintive tone has left him. Something's occurred to him he doesn't like. "You haven't got a tape recorder here, by any chance?"

"Nnno," Martin says, eyes narrowing. "I stopped bringing them home ages ago. Why?"

"Oh?" Jon frowns. "When did you start?"

Martin pulls a face. "Surely we don't need one."

"I'd like to… It would bring me peace of mind." 

"Jon." Exasperation in his voice again. Jon knows the feeling. "We are trying to _escape_ the Eye, aren't we?"

"Well," Jon says slowly, teeth pulling at his lip. "I think we'd better stop at mine after all."

  


  


  


  


Martin does drive, as it turns out. "I drove my mother around for ages," he explains, "before," and the blanks of 'before' fill automatically in Jon's mind: before resentment for spending her abled years raising a son she didn't want calcified under her skin. It's strange how this happens: that Jon has an idle thought, a curiosity, and the gaps fill in against his volition.

Martin even has a car—a rusting grey Corolla, though he doesn't drive it much in London. They ignore Basira's advice and park it a few blocks from Jon's flat, where Martin tries to convince Jon to stay behind.

"Why?" asks Jon, trying not to display his panic.

"If Elias is watching…" He gestures vaguely toward Jon's flat. Jon doesn't bother asking how he knows where it is. "I can get in unseen."

"How?" He'll have to let Martin out of his sight eventually, but he was hoping it might be tomorrow. "There's not exactly a trellis to get you in through the—" 

"It's suspicious both of us moving together anyway," Martin says. "We're reasonably… you know. Identifiable."

"No more than anybody else."

Martin stares disbelievingly, but doesn't explain himself. "And you're sure about this." He'd done his best to talk Jon out of the recorder altogether, but Jon won't be dissuaded. 

"I'm sure."

"Everything you record is bound to—"

"I know." But that's exactly the thing. The only reason they've known enough to save themselves is because Gertrude recorded everything. Whatever other harm the Archives have done—for all it's made them into what they are—they owe it their lives. 

Martin had replied that knowing this much had indeed gotten them here, "running for our lives, if you haven't noticed," but even if Elias is after them—especially then—Jon's still survived a visit to the Lonely and the Buried, and someone had damn well better benefit from the experience.

"We can just leave it, Jon," Martin says now, but he's leaned against the frame of the car, already in the street. "We can just go."

There will be another ritual. There will always be rituals. As long as there are people, there will be Entities trying to bring about the end of all things.

And there will always be someone trying to stop them.

There may be no escaping Elias. But Jon refuses to die, to be made an instrument, in vain. Those that follow deserve the armament of knowledge. No one should have to live through hell if it can be avoided.

"Someone has to carry the work," Jon tells him.

Martin doesn't look happy, but he nods. "Stay here."

"I'll come with you."

"Just give me your keys," says Martin, and Jon sighs and hands them over. "Get us a new car while I'm gone, would you?"

"How d'you suggest—"

"Just walk up to someone," Martin tells him with an exasperated wave. "Ask them to give you their keys."

Jon's getting the impression Martin's a lot more comfortable with the rules of this world than he is. It's not that Jon won't pressure people; he's done his share of coercive interrogation over the last few months. But apart from feeling that using his power makes him vulnerable to Elias' influence, it also just makes him… Well. He'd sooner not use it if he can possibly help it. Martin's cavalier attitude suggests it's not such a bad thing to use what he's got, but Jon feels about it the way he feels about the Archives: he may be enmeshed in it now, but it doesn't erase that it's all in the service of something bigger and unseen.

It turns out there's nothing really to stopping a man who's only just parked and asking him where he's put his keys. There's a bit more to actually getting them out of his pocket. What Jon lacks in size he makes up for in intensity and transparent determination to get the hell out of London, and he drives away while the man's still on the phone to police about the "deranged tramp" who's just stolen his car. 

Jon supposes that's what Martin meant when he said they stood out. He couldn't care less. His scarred palm folds against the plastic of the steering wheel, an unavoidable irritant. He drives six blocks down the road and then doubles back, pulling up to his building just in time for Martin to leg in. 

"I got you some clothes," Martin says, tossing an old crossbody bag of Jon's into the back seat. "Mostly random; sorry. Got your glasses case beside your bed, and the paperback that was facedown next to it. That's bad for the bindings, you know."

"And the recorder?"

"And the recorder," Martin says wearily. "You have a lot of Jean-Paul Sartre on your shelf."

"Not really."

"He's the only author repeated. Him and Agatha Christie."

"How long did you look? You weren't gone ten minutes."

"Did you study philosophy, then?"

"English," Jon admits begrudgingly. "But I… dabbled."

"In existentialism."

"Notions of being and nothingness have turned out to prepare me unusually well for my career," Jon mutters, and Martin's answering laugh warms hum as he veers them fast out of the city.

  


  


  


  


They agree, since neither one of them knows how to steal a car beyond fishing keys out of people's trousers, that it would draw more attention than not trying to switch cars along the way. That sticks them with this electric blueberry of a 2016 Ford Fiesta for the long haul. Jon does not like American cars any more than he likes Americans, and this one's not changing his mind; the quintessential family hatchback seems hardly fitting for the occasion, but that does make it a perfect getaway vehicle, at least as far as obfuscation goes. 

Not that he's ever told anyone he doesn't like American cars. But he'd forfeit his right to secrets long ago.

"I'd better take the first leg," Jon says, when Martin offers to drive. The shake he'd felt earlier has since quelled, but it's been long enough since Peter's statement that the urge to ask questions has grown alive in his mouth. It's a strange compulsion, a sort of thirst: a persistent discomfort with a clear solution. Stubbornness alone stops him from carrying it out. 

"You might rest," Jon says, instead of asking if Martin's tired. It won't do to be careless with questions. "Could be a long night."

"Don't think I'll be sleeping for a while," Martin replies, and Jon doesn't bother giving voice to his relief.

Darkness has fallen, streetlights casting orange through the car in staccato waves. They drive in silence for half an hour before Martin turns the radio to the news. They get out of London with little ado, but Jon's eyes flit reflexively to the rearview mirror every five minutes.

What is he expecting? Elias to come by on a motorbike, floating through the air like a film antagonist? He does expect that, and more. No part of London's receding suburbs offers the relief he'd expected.

The news repeats itself. A second Brexit election might be in the offing; testimonies were given yesterday for the contaminated blood scandal of the '80s. Martin turns the radio off before Jon has a chance. Parliamentary catastrophe seems to pale in their current environment of crisis, but it's hard now to feel powerless even in mundane spheres.

"What were you thinking?" Jon asks quietly, when the silence grows too weighted to bear. He is careful not to put his power behind it, but there's a tug regardless. He sees it from the way Martin tips his head, shakes something loose. Since they've left the city, Jon's had time to realize all Martin's done: all he's given up, his divestment of his own life for the ends of the Entities. Everything that ended with him pulled into the Lonely. 

It's not right to say Jon's angry, but he wants Martin to _talk_. They've been silent enough.

"Getting harder to resist that," Martin remarks, smile thin.

"But you _can_ resist it?"

"Not when you really mean it, I expect."

"I do mean it, I just—"

"Want to actually have a conversation?"

"Yes." Jon's not ignorant to the barb, the implication that they haven't had a proper conversation that wasn't fraught with doubt or diversion in more than a year. But that's not the point. "I can't just ask questions when there's something I want to know, Martin. You said before—"

"Ah."

"But it's not that simple. I can't—I won't _force_ it."

"Alright. It's just that…" Martin hesitates, straightens. "I just don't think I've got any secrets left from you anymore, Jon. Not if..." 

The tone of his voice holds more admission than seems intended. Jon heaves a sigh, shifting in his seat. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be." He says it easily, seeming really to mean it. "I don't really… it's not a big deal. Not with you. Elias… he used it to control people, to retraumatize them. You don't have that…" He waves a hand. "You're not _monstrous_."

Jon gives a startled, joyless laugh. "If that's what you see, you're not looking hard enough."

"Oh, alright then. Thanks for correcting my perceptions, I'll switch on that fear straight away. Ahh!" Martin says, his expression dead neutral. "Oh no! Trapped in a room with an Avatar of the Eye! _Never_ been in that situation before!"

"Alright," says Jon, mouth curling into a smile.

"Oh no! Whatever shall I do? The indignity of being known!"

"Yes, point taken." When Jon glances over, he finds Martin smiling. Warmth blossoms in him brutally, takes him by stranglehold, leaves him kneading a thumb against his stomach trying to loosen the knot. 

"Elias is monstrous _because_ of the fear," Martin explains. Something in his posture changes as he falls into the patter of conversation: he relaxes, leans back in his seat, one elbow resting against the passenger door. Talking about anything is hard for Jon, always has been, but Martin finds it easy; used to talk a mile a minute about anything and everything, the weather, his favourite tea, a nice dog he'd seen on his way in. Jon had once found it deeply annoying, until its absence seared a hole in his chest.

"He's not—" Martin interrupts himself, frowns. "Well, actually, I don't know what's true about Elias anymore." They had discussed Magnus on their way between flats, albeit not with any depth. "Your approach to this thing—yours and Daisy's, really—convinced me humanity's still, you know, a choice in all this. People like Elias, or Magnus, or those vampire hunters… they leaned into it, got a taste of power and... I dunno. Used it for gain. You're not doing that. You accept what's needed to stop the end of the world, and the rest you refuse." 

"It doesn't feel like that." 

"I had to remind you how to steal a car," Martin reminds him. Jon huffs a laugh. "I still don't think you should go cold turkey on statements; I don't think that's how this works. We have to, you know, accept what's changed to a certain degree. You don't really need to eat proper food anymore."

Jon frowns. "I—do."

"Really? When's the last time you had a proper meal? Cigarettes don't count."

It worries Jon that Martin knows about this.

"Statements keep you alive," Martin says. "Or they seem to play a part, at least. You may have noticed I'm reasonably fond of you, so I…" Another waved hand. "Well, it's not up to me. But I think there's room for compromise. It gets at what I'm trying to say, that you _don't_ want to just be an Avatar of the Eye. You—you asked me to run away with you, for Christ's sake." Martin gives a weak laugh, like he barely dares to believe it's true. "You don't want the statements. You seem to want to be free of this, you want to be as human as you possibly can. I see it in you all the time. That matters. You _didn't_ command an answer from me, even though you could have, even though you want the truth. I'm sorry, Jon; I just don't find you that threatening."

This conversation shouldn't be leaving Jon feeling heartened, but it is. "Why did you leave with me now? Why not then, why…?"

Martin's quiet a long moment. "You pulled me out," he says at last.

"Yes."

"That's—well. I had no other plans after that, so—" Martin straightens, clears his throat. "So why not? You weren't supposed to have done it, but you did, so... The point is that when you do use your powers, it's in the service of humanity. Or of human instincts, at least. I don't see you as a monster. No one else, no other avatar or... person, really, could have pulled me out of there. That's not how this works. I don't know how you did it, or why. But I…"

"You do know," Jon says quietly.

"I have an idea," Martin says, quiet in kind. "I don't think anyone else would have known the way back to the material realm, that's all I…" He shrugs. "I just think that keeping your willpower intact—keeping all our wills intact—matters to where we land in this whole damn thing. Peter Lukas made me an avatar of the Lonely because—because he thought I'd lost the will to resist."

"But you hadn't."

The silence grows unexpectedly long. Jon wonders if Martin's keeping his mouth shut to avoid the compulsion to answer, or of his own volition; finds it fleetingly promising that he can't tell.

Then he turns horrified to realize it tells him the truth either way.

Jon leans an unsteady hand against his mouth. The other stays tightly gripped at the wheel, eyes fixed on the road. "Martin…"

"Okay, fine, so I had one secret left. Here it is."

"No, no, let's—"

"You had died," Martin says over him, "and so had my mother, and I cared _not at all_ about the Magnus Institute; I never have. There comes a point—"

"Stop."

"I'm telling you freely."

"It's not that."

"You asked," Martin says firmly. "You don't get to pick your convenient truths. You wanted an answer, now listen to it." He doesn't raise his voice. Martin's never raised his voice in anger, not within Jon's hearing, but in the months since Jon's exchanged more than a passing word with his retreating back, Martin's learned to wield the truth like a weapon. "You want to know what I was thinking? You want to know why I'm coming with you now when I couldn't before? I was done with it. I was giving up, and you didn't bloody let me. Which is—fucking hypocritical, by the way." His voice breaks; Jon's heart wrenches. "You'd avoided the end of the world at the cost of your life already, and you left me out of it because—why? Because I was too weak?"

 _Because out of all of us,_ Jon thinks, _you deserved that fate the least. Because I thought there was a real chance I'd derail the mission if something happened to you. Because I cared too much._

"Because I trusted you alone with the Archives," he says.

"Oh, great. Thank you, that's—"

"No one else—no one else's judgment is sound." Jon can't even say this part right. "Besides that, you were instrumental to that mission. We wouldn't have succeeded if Elias—"

"The point is I wasn't good for much," Martin says over him. "Even managed to see you off to your death without telling you how I felt. After you died, I thought there was a chance I could still do one thing to make a difference for the world. Pick up the mantle you left behind."

"It wasn't my—" 

"That's how it started. I didn't care about what happened to me. Honestly, Jon, that was sort of the point." It is honest; Christ, it cuts. "But I—I suppose I've never been terribly decisive."

Jon drives on through the drudging silence. He should reach out, anchor Martin down, that's what he's here for, that's the _point_ of this; but he's never been good at that sort of thing, doesn't know how to start. 

"I am... so sorry," Jon manages, voice cracking.

"Don't," Martin says tiredly. "Anyway, I had my facts wrong. You went and got yourself resurrected—"

"I didn't—I was never dead."

"No one comes back from a coma like that. I've seen the dramas." 

Martin says it with a hint of levity, and Jon takes the cue; forces a smile. "I think if the dramas had anything to say about it, I'd have stayed in it another eight years," he offers. "Woken up just in time to interrupt your wedding or some such."

"Ah, well. Good bit of timing as it was, really. Death Do Us Part might be a concept the Lonely's not too familiar w—"

Once Jon figures out how to move his arm, it turns out to be easy to entwine their fingers after all.

Martin falters into silence. It's not a tense moment, nor an especially heavy one, but it holds an inexplicable suffocation. It's not until Martin caresses Jon's hand with his thumb that Jon understands the feeling for what it is. 

"Ah," he says softly; an interior punch. Martin seems unburdened by such bewilderment. With a steady exhale, he unfurls their fingers, pulls caressing thumbs across Jon's palm. 

Jon steadies his gaze on the road, heart pounding. Martin traces the length of Jon's fingers with his own. What is this feeling now? Something else from within and without him. Martin folds Jon's fingers into a fist, cages his hands around it, brushing his lips against Jon's knuckles, and Jon tries desperately not to crash the car. He knows suddenly, _explicitly_ , how long Martin's wanted to take proper stock of his hands—borderline pornographic, the knowledge decimating.

"How did you find me?" Martin asks. He doesn't seem to care that he's torn Jon apart with his plain desire. "Sort of antithetical to the Lonely, to be able to… find someone in it."

Jon filters his thoughts into order before trying to answer. Category One is thoughts relevant to the current discussion. Category Two is related to the way Martin is handling him. Category Three is how he feels about that. Category Four is differences between those feelings and feelings he has previously had. This is uncharted territory, after all, this compulsion to keep Martin within reach. Met with all this ruinous feeling, Jon's got no desire to pull his hand away—only wants Martin to take his stock.

Jon used to be a man of reason.

Category Five is a new idea, one Jon hates but that requires more attention. So much has changed within him; there's got to be some kind of explanation. He never used to know how to force people to talk, but now he can—and he never used to want this. Not _this_ , nothing near so intimate, nor anything like it. He didn't even think he was capable of feeling this way, until—

Gerard might have said differently. But surely Fear isn't the only type of Entity in the world.

"Elias called me," Jon says at last, swallowing against a dry mouth. "I was already coming your way, to be clear, but I was… lost in the tunnels. And then the door…"

Martin looks at him sharply, reverie broken. He lets go of Jon's hand, rummaging in the back. 

Jon embarrasses himself by reaching after him before his fingers curl on themselves and rest on the wheel. Martin resurfaces, tape recorder in hand. 

It isn't recording. Martin's relief is obvious. As though disarming a bomb, Martin pries the thing open and pulls out the tape. "These things are alive, you know," he mutters, tossing the tape in the glovebox. He slams the recorder shut with abrupt efficacy and tosses it into the back seat without ceremony. "They're like cats. Rotting mutated cats, sure, but..."

"They're—?" Jon clears his throat. "Like cats how, exactly?"

"They find you, and then they sit there and wait. It's like they want something from you. They know when to turn on—they even find me in the Lonely. I'm not even in the realm, but there they are, staring."

The inside of Jon's head suddenly feels very dense. "When you're in—the Lonely. With a tape recorder?"

"Yes, it's sort of… You know when you're trying to get an answer from someone, and you feel a bit of a tug? Almost like knowledge is being physically pulled across some sort of—"

"Yes," Jon says fervently, "but how do _you_ —"

"I've been taking statements for years, Jon. You think you're the only one—"

"You're an Avatar of the Eye— _and_ —"

"Come in handy, hasn't it?" Martin says, faintly defiant. "You're not exactly effusive with your feelings. Some things you might never get round to telling me. All for the best to pluck them out of the air." 

Jon's grip on the steering wheel suddenly becomes considerably more grounding. 

"I'm not near so powerful as you, of course," Martin says, "but they're not that different, the Eye and the Lonely. It's all just strings between realms. If you let it pull _you_ instead of the other way round, it's not all that hard to slip between realms yourself. I've been doing a bit of reading on string theory; nothing serious, of course, just Wikipedia summaries mostly, and it's actually quite—Oh, should we fuel up?"

Jon lets his gaze drag over to the petrol station. "I—could use a coffee," he croaks. "Do you—"

"I'll get you one." Martin pulls his wallet out of his back pocket. "Are you still pretending you don't take sugar, or—"

"I'll come in with you." Jon's less afraid Martin will disappear and more afraid now that he won't know Martin's will over another's if it happens. It's strange, what Martin said about not finding him threatening—it wasn't Martin who put himself irretrievably in the Lonely, after all. It was Peter Lukas, and Peter is dead. 

Jon imagines that's the definition of trust, that neither is afraid of the shadows cast by the other. But after so many years of avoidance, he's not sure how either one of them's earned it. 

Elias still hasn't stopped them—something confirmed with another fervent glance through the rear window, earning him Martin's look of concern. Jon's convinced it's a matter of time. It can't be this easy; they've tried to leave countless times before to no avail. Either Elias is coming, or something has changed.

Jon shudders to think which one he prefers.

  



	2. Hither, Hither

  


The assistants at the Archives used to call these sorts of intermissions Jon’s ‘thinking catatonia’. Tim had once tossed a pillow at Jon's head in the midst of it just to see what would happen and suffered a wrath so unimaginable no one had dared try it again. 

It’s been half an hour of motionless silence now. Martin had known it was coming when he’d grabbed the keys out of Jon’s hands without so much as a word of protest. Jon has progressions—ways that he likes to go about things. Plan, then action. Martin doesn’t plan to interrupt him. He likes it when Jon’s not trying to be anything—not the Archivist, not some disaffected scholar trying to bring order to a disordered world. Right now he’s just Jon, trying to work something out. 

Everyone tells Martin that Jon doesn't care about anyone other than himself. That's never been true. Jon's scared of caring. Making it work for anyone to like him saves him the inconvenience of personal relationships. Even now, surrounded by terrors, possibly being chased down the motorway by an immortal god-boss, Jon's biggest fear is of inspiring disappointment. It's part of what makes him a good avatar: he knows how to dig the worst secrets out of people because he knows where he keeps his own.

Jon may be a slight man, but he’s rarely this small. All his tall angles have been gathered together, pressed against the passenger door, stocking feet shoved under the windscreen. It’s rare to see Jon so unguarded. Martin counts himself lucky—one of the few Jon trusts enough to show even this. He usually knows how to make his presence known: sets his hands wide on a desk, props his ankles over one another as he sits back to read. What he lacks in constitution he makes up in temperament. Jon would scowl at a windstorm to drop its gusts.

There’s a frantic energy to silences like these. Jon will come out resolved; he always does. He is an awfully shrewd man. Even as he’d told Martin he might gouge out his own eyes, he’d managed to make it sound borderline sensible. 

Jon’s got such wonderful eyes—profound wells of brown, disarmingly warm. Always make Martin feel more a part of this world when they put him into focus.

Martin… has got to think about something else. Threads of his rumination keep creeping across the car. He can always tell when he’s giving Jon too much attention; usually fixes it by burying himself in work, but it’s harder in here. Jon’s right there, and he’s not wearing any shoes. When’s Martin ever seen him without shoes? He has nice feet, about as long as you'd expect. Oddly graceful in their socks. Vines of Martin's attention—no, tendrils! Tendrils of—of _tenderness_ —

“Martin.”

Martin jumps. “Er. Yes?”

“Is there a reason you’re thinking about—plants?”

 _Oh God._ “You can’t... read my mind, can you, Jon?”

“No,” Jon says. Martin sighs his relief. “Occasionally I just become aware of what people are thinking.”

Martin ticks his gaze over. “That’s… the same thing.”

“No, it’s not. Knowing you’re preoccupied is a bit different than…” Jon sighs, waves a hand. “If you don’t mind a bit of feedback—” 

“Feedback?”

“I think you might be better off with something a bit less… literal.” Then Jon rubs his eyes. “Ignore me. I’ve never been much with verse.”

Martin laughs loudly. “Poetry! Yes. No, I was just…”

“Drafting.”

“Exactly.”

Jon does not seem moved by Martin’s excuses, but he does, at least, let the subject drop. He reaches for his coffee—two sugars, that's how he likes it, that's how he's always liked it, Martin will carry that secret to the grave—and drinks from it, wincing the way Martin knew he would.

"You left it too long," Martin says.

Jon puts it down again. “Yes.”

Silence falls, a suffocating void.

"Nice and sorted, then?" Martin asks, tentative.

“What?"

"You had your thinking catatonia properly going. Didn't want to interrupt."

Jon sighs, resting his brow in his hand; then he looks at Martin with stark accusation. "How long have you known me, exactly?”

“Three years or something, isn't it? You became Head Archivist—"

"No.” Jon tilts his face away. “How long have you _known_ me."

Jon hates to be loved: a wire pulled taut and made to bend. "I don't know," Martin says softly. It feels cruel to smile, but he does it anyway. “A couple of years. All that time I was living in the Archives, I heard you—you know, talking. Incidentally, I mean, I wasn’t…” He waves a hand. “Statement givers and all that. Even when you didn’t believe people, you still talked to them. Listened to their stories, recorded them, filed them. Took them seriously as you could. It helped.”

"You started to know me then."

"I figured out you weren't heartless. That was a start."

Jon hums his discontentment. It's not that Martin enjoys pressing on the bruise, exactly; it’s just that Jon is an awfully easy mark. "I remember,” Martin says, still smiling, “after I'd given my statement on Jane Prentiss and Sasha had given hers, I asked why she got time off and I didn't. And you said—"

"'It's not like you can leave, Martin.'"

"Well… yes, but once you were feeling less antagonistic, you told me Sasha got vacation because working would make her feel worse and I was getting files because working would make me feel better. And you were right."

"I was terrible."

“A bit, yeah. But you also paid attention. Tried to be decent when you weren’t… you know, overwhelmed by the daily ins and outs of serving an immortal entity.”

Jon scoffs. “Gold star for effort?”

“No need to wallow. Fell for you anyway, didn’t I?”

A shock of silence. Jon’s spine bends under the weight of affection. “I’m trying to—”

“I know you are, but don’t bother. You didn’t like me overmuch, but you still gave me your back room. It said enough.”

“It wasn’t my back room.”

“Yes it was.”

“And I always liked you.”

Martin startles into a laugh. “No, you didn’t, but thanks for saying.”

“I did," Jon protests. "At least, in ways.” And there’s that token honesty. “Always thought you were a bit soft for that place, Martin, bit too human. I wanted you gone, I’ll admit; my methods… I haven't been kind. But it…” Jon sighs, looking out the window. Nothing about this is easy for him, Martin knows. “The first reports you gave me,” he goes on, voice hardened, “were _punishingly_ thorough. I had to course-correct.”

“Were they?”

"I asked you to confirm Yvonne Perrin’s alibi for Case 9980512 and you came back with fourteen pages of biographical information for her and her entire family."

He had done that. Martin had had the most horrible crush on Jon from the start. He’d wanted desperately to impress him—walked into his office on that first day, seen him stood behind that desk with his pressed shirt and sharp angles and felt his mouth gone dry. Jon had dressed impeccably well his first year at the Archives, a tireless façade of competence and order: his surprisingly diverse rotation of loafers always polished, a sharp contrast to Martin’s ratty trainers. Jon kept his office dimly lit, said the overheads gave him a headache; a reading lamp was installed to one side, angelically lighting him in incandescent hue. 

His hair had been more black than grey back then, but a few pale strands streaked back from his temples, as though set there by an imprecise brush. As Jon had gestured Martin into the chair across, Martin’s singular goal in life had become to have Jon forget his stern tone and strict posture in the service of praise—to feel those long fingers squeeze his shoulder, wrap kindly at his arm, pulling fondly through his hair.

“I wanted to do a good job,” Martin says. It’s true on several counts. Never strong in school, he'd had visions of being perceived as good at something for the first time in his life—by _anyone_ , really. Jon, Elias, even Sasha or Tim.

"You certainly did,” Jon says, sounding faintly amused. “I’d only needed to know where Perrin had been on February 9th, 1998, though, Martin, not on the day of her birth and the nineteen years following."

"It was relevant!"

"It was not."

“You asked me to confirm her alibi. I couldn’t do that in the strictest sense, but it _was_ her sister's birthday. The day before, her parents had died—not the _day_ before, obviously, but it was the anniversary. It was reasonable to think she was telling the truth about where she'd been, given how close she was to—”

“That’s exactly what I mean. You didn’t want to do the actual job, you wanted to make a _case_ for these people. That—” Jon clicks his tongue, grave again. “Apart from being not what we were hired to do, it was dangerous.”

“Heaven forbid we deviate from the Beholding’s plan.” 

“Any statement I asked you to research was bound not to have a happy ending,” Jon says, ignoring this. “Yet you insisted—”

“I didn’t care about happy endings,” Martin interrupts, “I cared about dignity. I remember that case. Yvonne Perrin was already dead, and so was her sister. I knew how they’d go down in history, condemned on Magnus tapes to what the Web made them do. But Yvonne said she’d been with her sister on her birthday. You don’t think it’s as important to record the people they were as what they turned into?” he asks, glancing aside. “For all you care about what _really_ happened, Jon, I should think you’d care about that.”

Jon’s silent a while. “You… wanted to give them restitution,” he says strangely.

“No one else was going to.”

“Yes. Yes, I… see that.” He clears his throat of sudden strain. “The fact remains, Martin, that for months I’d ask you what the weather was like, and you'd come back with a health report on the cafe next door. Those kinds of wasted hours—”

”You kept eating their sandwiches and then wondering why you felt off,” Martin says stubbornly.

Jon smiles, eyes closing. “I liked you,” he says quietly. “I did not like supervising you. You have a will of iron, difficult to command. You don't need me to tell you that.” 

Martin’s sure he hasn’t heard right. “ _Me?_ ”

“It does you credit. Someone like you, who operates on compassion, and, and human dignity…” Jon shakes his head. “You never had any business working for the Institute. I’d have fired you were I able. As it was, I was only trying to drive you out. I regret it now; I wasn’t kind, my words not more awful than my tone. But it wasn't because I didn't like you.” Face tilted down, Jon plays at a frayed buttonhole on his cuff. “I’m sure that's no consolation.” 

Martin has no ready reply. It is true that the first real question Jon ever asked Martin is why he worked at the Archives. 

“Lucky for me I didn’t succeed,” Jon says with a fortifying breath. “Any humanity I have left may well be traceable to you. I think—”

“No.”

“—I should have pulled you out of all this long ago. No, I’m serious, Martin; I can’t tell you what it meant to me sometimes you dragging me off to the cafeteria. Your resolute refusal to discuss anything more significant than the weather, someone talking to me like it was just another day. It made all the difference.”

Martin hadn’t discussed anything more significant than the weather with Jon because he hadn’t known what to say. Jon had been so strung-out and jittery that it was all Martin could do to stop him wielding a butter knife at passers-by.

“You helped me first,” Martin says instead. “After Jane Prentiss… I was only returning the favour.”

“I did nothing.”

“You were all but living in the back room before me, I saw the instant soup containers."

Jon swears under his breath. "I'd wondered where those went."

"You were at the Archives sixteen hours a day even after I moved in. How many times did I find you asleep at your desk? Twenty-two times, Jon,” Martin shouts, as Jon groans into his hands. “More, if you count the times you heard me coming in and sat up pretending to work. I knew I was a bother, but you never—we—I mean… you know.” Martin waves a hand. “We’ve been at this a while, this pulling each other out of things.”

Jon goes quiet again. “I suppose we have.”

Something in his tone degrades Martin’s resolve.

“Martin,” Jon says.

Panic breaks over his skin. “Jon, maybe we shouldn’t—”

“We _should_ do this now. If Magnus takes me over—”

That is not what Martin expected to hear. “If… what?” 

“I won’t ask you to kill me.”

“Jon.”

“But you must promise me you’ll stay away. Promise you won’t—”

“ _Jon._ ”

“—try to pull me out, this time.”

“What are you _talking_ about?”

“You know what I’m for.”

“No. Yes, I mean, you’re for—”

“Elias won’t stop. _Magnus_ won’t stop. He needs someone more powerful than Elias—than himself, I suppose—or he wouldn’t have gone to this trouble in the first place. The Beholding is preparing a ritual, and for some reason it needs me to complete it.”

“Then refuse!”

Jon exhales slowly. “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t it—”

“Did you not refuse Peter Lukas? Look where it got you.”

Martin’s heart pounds in his ears.

“I don’t know what happened to the real Elias,” Jon says. “If he’s still in there, or… But I have no hope that he meaningfully survived. I have no hope of doing any better myself.”

“I’m not doing this with you,” Martin says numbly. “It’s not happening.”

“If my refusal was an option, the message has already been sent. He would have killed me by now, moved onto the next—”

“Stop it.”

“He did it to Gertrude. You must be aware, Martin—”

“I’m not discussing a hypothetical.”

“—it could be you he wants next. He’s had you reading statements because he wants you to take over as Archivist after I’m… him. If they get me—” 

“Enough! There’s a long way between here and there, there’s… I mean”—a bit desperately—“we are running _away_ , aren’t we?”

“How long do you think that’s really going to last?”

“I don’t know! But if you think I’m about to—”

“If Elias comes,” Jon tells him—“run.”

“Like hell," Martin growls. "We’re in this together.”

“There’s a lot of options—” 

"Shut up, Jon.”

“—between coming back for me and pulling the trigger. I’m asking you to consider them.”

Basira hadn’t fired the gun on Daisy. That’s what he’s thinking of.

“I won’t do that,” Martin says.

“You have to.”

“I’m not planning for the worst-case scenario. What part of ‘We’re in this together’ is hard for you to understand? You want to talk about ways of stopping Magnus _before_ he gets to you? Fine, let’s do that. Let’s assume he is coming, plan evasive maneuvers. But I’m not about to just let him take you.”

“Will you please listen—”

“No,” Martin says shortly. “If it was me asking you to leave me behind, what you would you be able to say, Jon? Could you really say you’d stay gone? Because I just can’t.”

It’s a risky question, built on instincts Martin’s not yet grasped. Jon’s never given voice to his feelings, never even begun, only asked veiled questions that weren’t the right ones. Martin knows _something_ —what hangs in the air, what feelings don’t quite fit in his chest, like they belong to somebody else. He knows it the way Martin knows without Jon ever telling him that Jon’s grandmother’s name was Phyllis. He knows his parents were called Ken and Jolene, that Jon’s believed on and off they died of paranormal causes for years; that he thought he’d had a sister once while going through old photos, only for it to turn out to be the girl next door. 

Sometimes Martin starts a sentence and has knowledge by the end of it, finds he’s incorporated it into his words—rivers flowing together, fibres weaving into rope. That Jon cannot truthfully say he could leave Martin behind is a shot in the dark: pulled from nothing, and yet from more than nothing. Pulled from Jon’s confessional tone, from his huddled posture, from the way his fingers massage at his brow.

“That’s not fair,” Jon says.

“Why not?”

“Because you still have a chance.”

Words turned to daggers. “We both do.”

“No we don’t.”

“We’re giving ourselves that chance right now. You don’t get to give up on me. If I don’t get to, then you don’t get to, that’s the _deal_.”

“There is no deal.”

“Have you been paying attention?" Martin shouts. "We made this deal _ages_ ago. No, you shut up and you listen to me,” he says over Jon’s objection. “I’m about as likely to stand around and watch the likes of Jonah Magnus take you as you are to let the likes of Peter Lukas anywhere near me. We’re in this together, have been a long time, and we’re sure as hell not stopping now. If you wanted me to go on without you, you should have left me in the bloody abyss.”

“Martin—”

“Everything else is fair play. Stopping Magnus, stopping whatever ritual you think is coming—together? Fine. Jolly. Let’s turn this car around, tear the Institute down brick by brick. But I won’t be walking away from you, not now. You gave up on facing this alone the minute you pulled me back into the world.”

Jon says nothing for a long time. When Martin looks over, the terror’s clear on his face. 

Martin’s mouth goes dry; his eyes flit to the rear-view, but see nothing there. “Sorry." He’s not sure when he’s seen such a complete abandonment of Jon’s every mask. “I don’t mean to fight, I…”

Jon shakes his head, places a hand loose over his mouth. “I’m not good at this sort of thing,” he says hoarsely.

“I’m not any better.”

“It’s been… some time since I’ve been close with anyone.”

“Yes.”

“I tend to be hard on people.”

Martin frowns. “Yes…”

“I may be hard on you.”

It seems possible Martin has lost the thread of the conversation. “Do you—want to be?”

“ _No,_ ” Jon breathes.

Martin’s stomach drops. “Oh.”

“It’s the last thing I want.”

It’d be a lie to say Martin hadn’t been waiting for the let-down-easy, the news his hopes are too high. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s mistaken friendship for feelings. He’s done it before; he’ll do it again. Martin falls in love too easily, too often, creates poetic expectations beyond reality’s scope.

“Oh,” Martin says, unsteady, trying to find ground. “Oh. Alright, then.”

“But it doesn’t change who I am.”

Catastrophe has deafened him, or rendered him stupid. “What doesn’t?”

“This.”

“Sorry, I… I’m not sure what you mean.”

Jon glances at him, fear bright on his face. 

It’s hard to hold Jon’s eye when Martin’s fighting not to break. 

“I have never,” Jon says slowly, gaze drifting away, “fffelt… about anyone, the way I feel about you.”

For an earth-shattering moment, Martin can't breathe. 

A thousand nights he’s lain awake thinking of this. Countless theories, how the words might sound coming out of Jon's mouth. He’d imagined, naively, a murmured nothing against the shell of his ear, the smell of old paper, the Archives’ damp—Jon’s desk digging into the backs of his thighs, Martin holding his body close. He’d imagined trembling post-coital words, crisp tones and confidence, declarations made matter-of-fact; he had not imagined they’d be hurtling up the M6 for their lives. He had not imagined Jon’s voice shaking in fear, that he’d have gathered himself out of Martin’s reach. He had not imagined him curled against the passenger door, that Martin would join him in panic sweats.

But none of that matters. What matters is the conviction in his voice.

This matters to Jon. It matters, and it's true.

“I’m not going to pretend I’m an easy man,” Jon says; Martin’s breath trembles upon release. “My personality is not attractive. I know what I’m capable of, I know my limitations. I’m not suitable as a partner.”

Martin grips the wheel tightly, desperate to keep the car on the road. “Let me decide that.”

“My relationships end when people realize they want more than I can give.”

“Are you… trying to talk me out of wanting you?”

“I want you to make an informed decision. Slow down the car.”

Martin’s grown a leaden foot. He eases the gas, loosens his fists on the wheel. “I’m informed.”

“You’re not. I—”

“Jon,” Martin interrupts. “I need you to understand that I expect very little.”

“That’s not as true as you think it is.”

Martin chokes out a laugh; it sounds like a sob. “You think you know better than me?”—but then the knowledge fills in: tears, recrimination, passion in tatters. “Oh," he says without thinking. "Is this about what happened with Georgie?”

Jon's face registers the tug before Martin really realizes it’s there in his voice.

"Oh no," Martin says. 

An expression of betrayal papers over Jon's fear. “What do you know about—” He stops, jaw clenching. “How much do you know?”

“Mostly—er—gossip.”

“ _Gossip?_ ” 

“Melanie and Basira…” 

Jon growls his displeasure. “ _Melanie._ ”

“She… well. They were curious as to—”

“That’s very discouraging.”

“Sorry.”

“Not your fault.” Jon sighs. “Frankly, it’s easier this way.” 

Then a gate opens—and Martin _knows._

How Jon and Georgie met in school, both at Balliol; how easily they sparred in class. How they agreed over drinks, Georgie wearing Jon down over a series of weeks, that the paranormal _could_ exist without ever admitting to having experiencing it themselves. How everything seemed fine at first, how Georgie tossed aside Jon’s memorized conversation points and let him wax poetic about the modernists at length. How easygoing Georgie was. How badly Jon wanted to make it work. How he’d stopped outside a ring shop once in passing and realized everything that felt wrong. 

How Jon, mired in cowardice, allowed the relationship to slowly degrade, hoping she would be the one to break it off. How stubborn she was, how tightly she held. How he finally put her off, in the heat of exams, when he said he had more important things to think about than meeting her needs.

“It was apparent I wasn’t engaged,” Jon says. The knowledge settles over Martin, tingling and warm. He hadn’t realized the feeling can go both ways. “Georgie wanted someone excited to be with her, to sleep with her. I don’t blame her.” Jon tips his head. “Everyone deserves that.”

“Ah,” Martin breathes.

“I do crave a certain degree of closeness. All I’ve wanted all night is to—” Jon aborts a gesture. “Keep you... here, with me. Do you take my meaning?”

“I do.”

“You deserve better than your own words parroted back to you. But you’re right that neither of us is in this alone. I won’t leave you behind. I hope you believe that.”

The proof is in the fact Martin’s here to hear it.

“Nor can I offer you complete enthusiasm, is the thing. Not in the way you deserve.”

“Let me decide what I deserve.”

Jon besets him with a doleful look. “You were prepared to throw your life away earlier today.”

 _I had less to live for then_ , Martin thinks wildly; but that won’t do. It won’t do to think about that anymore. “Peter Lukas banished me there, if you’ll remember,” he says. “Do you plan to do the same to me now? Banish me to a fate not of my choosing?”

“I—”

“That you could feel this way and just—” His agitation grows in spite of his efforts. “That you’re going to—that you, that you _care_ , that I—and you think somehow it cancels out just because you—”

“Martin.”

He bats Jon’s reaching hand aside. He won’t be comforted into submission, not now. “You keep talking about what I deserve," Martin says. "But you haven’t asked me what I _want_.”

Martin can hear Jon’s unsteady breath. “Well, I—alright. What is it you want?”

“You.” That’s all there is to it; he won’t embellish the truth. “I don’t care about your warnings, your imagined cruelty.”

“You should.”

“To hell with all that. Is that what you think of me? That I shouldn’t want you just because you—don’t like sex, overly?”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Then explain it to me. Use your bloody words for once.”

Jon slumps in his seat, face in hands. A distant set of tail lights blinks into and out of view as Martin takes them on the curves around Cannock, the road a low whine under the tyres.

“Sex is… a favour,” Jon says. “To others. I don’t want it myself. I recognize that others do. I have varying levels of interest in”—he exhales—“the task. That’s how I think of it, Martin, I think it’s right to admit. But it’s a task I should often like to do. It’s…" He clicks his tongue. "Forgive me for this. But it is often as though you were asking me to tie your shoe. I know how to tie someone’s shoe. I understand the mechanics involved. I know a competent shoe tie when I see one; I can deliver one in kind. If you wanted me to tie your shoe, sometimes I should like to do it very much. It’s a small favour to you, it makes you happy, it affects me not at all, it builds happiness and intimacy and trust, and so on. Occasionally, I’ve found people’s reactions to my tying their shoes sufficiently fascinating to suggest it myself. I have been known to perform the task with experimental enthusiasm. I may have plenty of good reasons to tie your shoe, but it doesn’t interest me for itself.” Jon splays a hand at his chest. “I myself never need my shoe tied.”

“You wear loafers.”

“Well..." Jon raises his eyebrows. "Yes, actually, that’s quite apt. The need to have my shoe tied simply isn’t there. If someone should try, generally I find the experience to be uncomfortable. That’s bothersome to some people. They think I should also want my shoe tied and don’t understand why I don’t simply change my shoe. They think I should be approaching others to tie their shoe for them, that my preference for loafers is somehow a commentary on them. I understand their hesitation. I may never have the enthusiasm over this shoe-tying ritual as others might like me to have. It makes people feel undesired.” Jon looks at him starkly. “This, above all, is what I should like to avoid.”

“Right. But—”

“I’m sorry to say there is never a time when I think about a person, my God, you sublime creature, there is nothing I want more than to tie your shoes. Sometimes I have my hands full of boxes and I’m trying to get somewhere and it is genuinely inconvenient for me to drop everything and tie your shoe. Other times—sorry—I simply don’t understand why you can’t just slip something on so I may be left to my book in peace. Is this making sense?”

“Very much so.”

Jon seems as burdened to hear it as he does relieved. He drags a hand through all that gorgeous hair, holds his knuckles to his scalp. “To be honest with you, Martin, I thought I was finished trying to make sense of desire. I had long ago contented myself with being alone.”

Martin had seen as much in his flat. A separate bedroom, fastidiously kept; not a speck of dust. A disaster of a living room to compare. Files strewn everywhere, statements stolen from the Archives piled on chairs—a map of Britain pinned to the wall and covered in string. Books gracing every corner, shelves stacked full, rumpled post-its sticking out every which way.

Everything how he liked it. He was the same at the office: Jon’s neat appearance a sharp contrast with the flurry of papers at his desk. He’s a man of contradictions, owns every one—but it barely kept the Lonely at bay. Martin felt it lurking at the corners, drew strength from the shadows it cast in the room.

“I don’t understand… this feeling,” Jon says, hand at his chest. “I hadn’t expected it.”

“You don’t want it.”

“That’s not it,” Jon says quickly. “But it—it doesn’t change that I make a terrible partner.”

“Do you intend to be?”

“Of course not. But I was, even _before_ I inherited preternatural powers that have me slouching toward Bethlehem.”

Telling, Martin thinks, that Jon thinks of love in tandem with the end of the world. “I do have those, too, you know.”

Jon raises his head. It seems he hadn’t thought of that.

This is simple. It’s become very simple. This is stupid, not hard. “Do you,” Martin asks; the words catch in his throat. “Do you want to be with me, Jon?”

The following silence stems not from uncertainty, but from an inability to get out the words. “Very much so,” Jon gets out at last. 

“Then for the love of God,” Martin manages, “stop fighting it.”

Jon gives a strange laugh—relinquishing, strained. “Alright."

“Alright,” Martin says. 

Silence crowds them then. For a long stretch of road, neither seems able to breathe. Martin looks over at last, risks a glance at Jon’s face—and Jon doesn’t look back, but Martin’s not sure he’s seen Jon look this happy before.

“I’m not good at this,” Jon says again, faint.

Martin laughs. That does the job—shatters the tension, gives them over to warmth. “God. Have you ever said a feeling out loud before?”

“No,” Jon assures him; Martin laughs again. “Nothing that—bracing.”

Without even thinking, Martin reaches and takes Jon’s hand. Jon seems consoled; laces their fingers together without missing a beat. “It is awfully Jon Sims of you,” Martin tells him, ignoring their sweaty palms, “to sit there telling me how hard it is to not be a bastard. You know that?”

Jon’s laugh is a sound Martin’s never heard before: plain in its relief, unburdened and whole. “‘Oh, no!’” Martin says, keen to draw it out; affects Jon’s accent badly. “‘I’ve got to be _decent_?’”

“I’m not known for my tact," Jon admits.

“‘However will I manage??’”

“Yes, alright.”

Martin knows what he wants now. He knows what comes next. He worms their fingers tight together. “What, er… What _do_ you like, exactly?”

“Mm? What do you mean?"

“Just looking for a—” Martin clears his throat. “Am I not meant to kiss you, or…?”

“Oh, no," Jon breathes. "I should think that’d be fine.”

“Yeah?”

“I enjoy closeness, as I said. Actions for their own sake that aren’t means to an end...” Jon smiles. “I do enjoy intimacy in general, much as I struggle to foster it. Passing glances, meaningful touch—a moment, a day. Hearing someone making tea in the background when I’ve sat down to read, that’s all very…” 

Then Jon sits up abruptly. He leans a hand on the dash for support, craning around. Martin’s pulled them off the road. Jon looks out the back in panic, body straining between the seats. “God, Martin," he breathes, "what's the matter?"

Martin releases his seatbelt, turns Jon’s face toward him, and kisses him.

Jon stills. His fingers close against the dash, nails across plastic. Nothing happens—until he grabs Martin by the collar, and _pulls_.

Martin has spent—years, imagining this. Imagined Jon’s soft breath at his neck after long nights at the archives: tentative hands, skin seeking solace; a stolen kiss, a bashful retreat. He’d believed a fragility must exist in such a moment: the poetry of an orbit finally closed. 

He was wrong about that.

Jon kisses like a fucking maniac.

Jon’s long fingers slide up Martin’s neck, into his hair, curling over to pull him down. Martin goes where he’s wanted, never one to ignore a command. Jon’s lips, chapped and trembling, deepens the kiss—a lasting pull, a sudden give. 

A sound pulls out of Martin’s throat. His hands grip aimlessly, dragging Jon close. The gap between the seats is too broad, the handbrake so inconveniently placed. Martin wants to settle Jon in his lap, feel him leaning overhead, feel his long fingers grasped in his hair.

He doesn't do that. He doesn’t know what Jon wants; they can’t get bogged down here. Not with this, this— _ah,_ Jon's—this is a fluke, this, oh, _God,_ the slip of Jon’s tongue against his lip. Another sound from his chest: true and too honest. Jon's fueling desire and devastation in turns. He seems halfway inclined to crawl into Martin’s mouth, his hand mean in Martin’s collar, mouth stale with coffee, body tight with conviction. The bright flare of unexpected teeth; Martin doesn’t care, he wants it, can’t extricate himself, doesn’t even want to try. He slides a thumb against Jon’s palm, of half a mind to pull them apart—winds up entwining their fingers, drawn in deeper still. The kiss turns long, impossibly deep, the grief of near parting in every touch. The last thin relic of Martin’s control is poured into pressing his foot against the brake as they sway across the seats. 

With final, deliberate effort, they drift apart. Martin tips his head aside, brow set against Jon’s. 

“Alright,” he murmurs, after a moment. He's breathing hard; they both are. “Think that answers if we’re compatible enough.”

Jon is deathly still, except for trembling fingers clenched in his shirt.

“Alright?” Martin asks; then he pales with concern when Jon shakes his head. “Oh, God? What did I do, what—what can I—”

Silently, Jon slides Martin’s hand under his own shirt and presses it hard against his chest. His heart beats wildly under his ribs. 

Jon holds Martin’s palm against it, covers his hand with his own; leans into the touch when Martin spreads his fingers wide. “Explain this to me,” Jon asks against his mouth.

Martin gives a fluttering laugh. He can’t help it. His heart is beating just as fast. “I wouldn’t know how.”

Jon's swallow is dry. “Defies reason.”

Martin nods, presses his palm harder still. “I’m sorry. People try to explain it. Success is mixed. There's quite a good poem from Keats, though, it’s called ‘Hither, Hither, Love’—”

Jon breaks into a stuttered laugh, breath warm against Martin’s lips. It startles Martin into silence; he traces the shape of Jon’s smile with his thumb. He wants to find out the taste of it, wants never to move—wants to stay tangled up in him forever, feeling Jon’s laugh against his skin.

They sit there a while, longer than seems wise, engine vibrating beneath them. Finally Jon tips his head forward and kisses Martin again—sweetly this time, hand soft at his jaw.

There’s Martin’s moment of poetry.

They pull apart for good this time, though the draw between them doesn’t fade. Settled back in their seats, they spare a moment to look out the dash, headlights painting the pullout in white.

“So you _didn’t_ see Elias, then,” Jon rasps.

Martin coughs a laugh. “No.”

“You just wanted to kiss me?”

“Afraid so.” Having got a grip of himself, Martin puts on the indicator and pulls onto the road.

Jon watches with detached bewilderment, hair a glorious mess from Martin’s attention. “Do you want me to drive?” Jon asks at a remove.

Martin honestly wonders if he could, in this state. “If I didn’t have to watch the road I think I’d only watch you,” he says. “Embarrassing for us both. Much better this way.”

It’s a bit on the honest side, but Jon nods, as though Martin hadn’t just bared his soul in response to a logistical question. 

As the car returns to speed, Jon shakes out of his daze—stretches out as far as he can, hitching one arm behind his head. It’s a tiny car, but he makes it work; he's loose-limbed and calm, forgetting to arrange himself in his own image. Martin watches him out of the corner of his eye, pretending he's not. He’s not sure he’s ever seen Jon this relaxed before. Myriad firsts. 

“You should try to sleep a bit,” Martin says. “Seven hours left to kill.”

“No,” Jon says tiredly. “My humours will balance. Just enjoying the momentary lull in the pursuant dread and terror of our situation, that’s all.”

It’s hard not to feel pleased. “I had no idea I was such a good kisser.”

Jon shoots him a circumspect glance. “It’s been a while, mind.”

Martin laughs. Jon’s smile broadens, his head tipping back. It’s easier, now that Martin knows Jon loves him, to tell when he’s being—

—Jon loves him.

Martin breathes carefully, to keep his lungs remembering what they’re for.

Silence has always been Jon’s default state. Martin’s learned to love it from him—how Jon trusts Martin with it, how they’ve learned to work within it. Questions asked and answered with barely a glance, the rustle of paper replacing words. 

But he’s not sure he can handle another one of Jon’s descents into the depths of thought just now. He wants him too much, can't bear to let the just-shared moment pass without a trace. “Can I ask you a question?”

Jon pries his eyes open, sitting up. “Of course.”

“Oh, you did rest. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Just trying to get my heart rate down.”

Jon’s a terrible liar. He just doesn’t want to leave Martin alone.

God, it’s so easy to just— _know_ things right now. No wonder Jon struggles with this. “Please get some rest.”

“Ask your question, Martin.”

No one on Earth more stubborn than Jon. “Why are you _so_ terrified of this? I—I mean, I get... a little, but—”

Jon exhales; shoves his feet loosely into his shoes. Martin’s mind instantly manifests a detailed and passionate catalogue of the sounds he thinks Jon might make were Martin to rub his thumbs into Jon's soles.

“Is it that obvious?” Jon asks.

“Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don’t be. I only want…” Martin winces. “For you not to be scared? Quite a stupid thing to say, really, under the circumstances—”

“I thought I had nothing left to lose,” Jon interrupts, looking away from him, out at the trees. “Now I know better.”

Martin finds he has nothing to say. He knows the feeling, could tell Jon as much, but he has the suspicion Jon already knows.

Instead, Martin offers a hand. Jon takes it; presses his mouth to Martin’s knuckles, shuts his eyes, and breathes.

A gentle kiss and a fast retreat, his chapped lips catching on Martin’s skin. “Let me know,” he says quietly, settling back in his seat, “when you want me to drive.”

Jon keeps hold of his hand, and Martin’s fine with that. Much easier, with grounding company, to let the silence take after all.

  



	3. These Bestial Hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Additional / recurring warnings for both doomsday thinking—"there's no way out" kind of ideas—and also what you'd expect from the Lonely: struggles with self-worth, negative self-talk, determination no one could really love you, etc. etc. MAG170 gave me the kick in the ass to finish this chapter, if that gives you any kind of idea, though most of it has been written since March.

  


Desperate to flee, Jon has driven too far; he stalls the car in the abandoned square. 

There is comfort to be found in the stillness. Dawn offers fragile hope against the horizon. Streets lined with cobblestone houses sit deadened in the low light of the morning. In the fading pall of twilight, a single warm square of light assures him of life in a window down the street.

They have made it this far. It doesn’t feel nearly far enough. Martin snores in the passenger seat, Basira’s directions clenched in his hand. Jon’s useless without them, but doesn’t dare wake him. Better to get a lay of the land when there’s no one around—find the routes out of town, the market, the chemist. See when they open, when it’s right to come back.

Jon rolls the car quietly through Dufftown’s streets. Distilleries prove easier to find than the grocer. Daisy was a hobbyist about scotch, before—used to toured distilleries on holiday, kept a collection at her flat. 

The past tense troubles him. It is not that she is no longer a hobbyist about scotch; it is that she is no longer a hobbyist. Mourning is a human emotion, at least. 

Martin’s been asleep for the better part of three hours, and Jon’s grown hungry again in just that time. They’d passed hundreds of miles talking, getting to know each other with intensified purpose: two inept archaeologists tripping over artefacts already partially unearthed. Martin is an only child, an effective orphan now. He doesn’t know where his father is, brushes off Jon’s offer to seek him out. “He stopped mattering to me a long time ago,” Martin said. Jon’s never known Martin not to care about something before, but it turns out he does it with as much passion as when he cares a great deal. 

His mother, meanwhile, died of Huntington’s disease. “Used to worry about whether I had it already,” he told Jon, casual as anything. “Hereditary and all. I can be a bit clumsy, you know. Always thought it meant more than it did.” Jon had always thought he moved with unusual care, actually, but perhaps that was why. “Finally just decided I was probably going to get it eventually and decided to go about my life until then.”

“You never got genetically tested?”

“No. Much worse knowing.”

“But if you know it’s coming—”

“I’d spend my whole life counting down to the end of days,” Martin said firmly. “No, Jon, I won’t do that. Most people want to live in the moment, but I prefer to live like there’s always tomorrow. Nice to go to bed thinking there’s always another chance to do better, to do things right, you know?”

“Did I enjoy Oxford?” Jon echoed when Martin asked. “Eh—yes and no. There’s the sort you’d expect, and then there’s the rest of us, there on merit instead of money. Rolling our own cigarettes, having the same debates about the classics night after night, all of us pretending we know what we’re doing there and none of us having the slightest idea. Same as any college, I’d expect.”

This seemed to strike Martin as funny. “Doesn’t really fit with my idea of Oxford.”

“It’s not universal. We were all of us prigs and none of us knew it.”

Martin’s smile grew broader. “You know your accent gets posher the longer you talk about it.”

“I am aware,” Jon said, playing it up, allowing a smile himself when Martin threw his head back and laughed. “Proves the point, really. Great deal of posturing, not much substance.”

“Posturing’s served you well, though.”

“I suppose it has.”

They swapped places just shy of the border, pulling over by a copse of trees. The intention was to stretch, to relieve themselves, to dig out some food for Martin and for Jon to have a smoke, but such intentions proved shortlived: Martin emerged from the trees and took Jon into his arms, leaning him against the car, kissing him deep as the cigarette sat smouldering in Jon’s hand. 

Half an hour later, when the conversation lulled and Martin had shown signs of falling asleep, Jon had forced his remaining questions about Martin’s life down. He seems to be full of them, each pulled from his throat by the last—an endless line of knotted scarves. 

Part of his crush to hear Martin’s secrets is an attempt just not to know them by accident; anything Martin says freely is another boundary Jon doesn’t have to cross. But he’s not naive enough to put it down to that. The stronger drive is the gnashing hunger, the beast within, the ravenous thing that would dash Jon’s head against the rocks if it meant learning something new. This thing lives in him, an inherited inhumanity growing out of his soul like a sick abscess.

He is afraid of it—yes. But he is also its devoted servant. Worse than fighting against it is the urge to give in, to ask Martin anything and everything; to pull over by the side of the road, stop a random passerby, and mine their secrets out of them just to feel the high.

Jon means not to ask questions of Martin again. In the hours he’s been asleep, Jon’s workshopped a thousand ways to talk about things in ways that don’t necessitate questions at all. Words seem dangerous in more ways than one now. He plans to say without them whatever he can.

It’s taken him until seeing Dufftown’s stony façade to believe that Elias is not in immediate pursuit, but Jon believes it now. He must be playing a game. It’s a power move, tacit confidence that he can find Jon whenever he wants—and Jon doesn’t doubt it. It’s hard to believe Elias could let Jon go even for a spell, but that’s what Jon’s been given: a parole of a sort. A few days’ time to fix his affairs. 

It’s also, whether Elias intends it or not, one last chance for Jon to determine his fate. This freedom is temporary, the way trapping questions in the back of his throat can only last so long—there is a force growing within him, and it is unstoppable, and eventually Jon will have to give in. Him and Martin together—they’re not enough to fight it. There’s a reason they’ve chosen flight over fight. Jon cultivates information like a farmer at harvest, now only eats and sleeps out of a sense of obligation—he is tired; he could sleep now, but he would not feel restored until he learned something new. He will never reach top form again unless he victimizes people or reads from a statement—that’s the genius of the Archives, of course. They collect the stories that feed the Eye, that give Avatars their power, all under the guise of scholastic research. It’s a lie. They are dealers. Jon’s reliant on them now if he wants to keep his power, and Elias knows it. 

Elias is waiting for the moment Jon can’t go on anymore, for that state of fatigue—either too weak to fight, or weak enough to give in to his demands.

It’s funny, in a way. God, it is funny; Jon laughs so weakly the air barely stirs. In leaving him this fleeting façade of freedom, Elias has made another reveal—that he’s made Jon more powerful than him. Ironic, or a brilliant part of his calculations. If Elias is biding his time until Jon becomes weak… there’s an easy solution to keeping him at bay. 

It is never to become weak. It is to ask his questions, to wring Martin dry, to case Dufftown’s streets for any knowledge he can. He could raid this place, become the thing what lives under their beds, except that he looks like a man and meets them in day. An unsuspecting menace. The villain in one of those shows that pretends to be about crime but that are horror movies thinly veiled— _What’s the worst day of your life?_ the slender man asks, and they’d tell him in turns, each and every sorry one.

Accepting his eldritch fate could keep Elias away. It would make him the next thing for Basira to put down, become the next person people talk about in the past tense. _Jon always used to smoke in the Archives, but he’s not a being that smokes anymore._

He thinks of the Archivist Gertrude blew up under the Library of Alexandria, and rejects the idea outright. 

Quite apart from being protective of his humanity, giving into the power would mean Elias had won. Nor could he protect Martin that way. It’s all fine and well to believe that he’s strong enough to fight off the Lonely now, but the stronger he gets, the more appealing the idea to pull Martin’s fears out of him one by one. It might consume him. It might destroy him. It might break Martin, send him right back to where Jon pulled him from. 

The power would give him time to take Elias down, burn the Archives to the ground—make sure this never happens to anyone again. It would let him fight the next ritual.

Martin snores softly in the passenger seat.

He could try a middle ground—keep reading statements that already exist. The problem is that he would have to do so indefinitely. This, too, Elias must have considered. They should have taken more of the statements, Martin was right; he understands these things better than Jon. Humanity’s capacity for manipulation, the mortal schemes behind the monsters. Statements will maintain Jon’s power, keep him and Martin out of Elias’ grasp, enable him to at least _try_ to fight the coming rituals—and every statement will slowly erode him, take him another step further from his receding humanity.

He would be reliant on the Archives—on Elias—for his power. He would be the true Archivist, complicit with the Eye. He could never destroy the Archives without destroying himself—without, perhaps, destroying them all.

Jon can either feed the slathering beast that lives in him, stoke his power on statements of loathing and fear—or he can starve it, allow himself to weaken, lose the ability to fight. Leave Martin to watch someone else wither away in front of him, leave the other fears to fight over the Earth.

The second Jon gets weak enough—Elias will come. Jon believes that in his very core.

He can’t protect Martin from the Lonely as a weakened man any better than as a powerful one. He can’t protect anyone from anything then. 

It’s a moot point regardless—all roads lead back to Elias. As monster or man, with his power or without—Elias will claim him in due time.

How Martin factors into all this… Jon knows, and he doesn’t. Martin looks at Jon and sees a man. Martin’s determined to face this by his side, no matter what warnings Jon tries to offer.

There’s another alternative to all this, of course, one that takes the choice out of Martin’s hands: he could leave Martin behind. Pull over in an unknown town and leave him sleeping in the car, give himself to the Archives and let Martin live.

Only Jon promised he’d never leave Martin alone.

Jon’s long since known he hasn’t deserved a happy ending. Now he knows he isn't going to get one. But if he is very lucky and very brave, he might still manage a happy few days. It’s a wild thought, a horrid one, one Jon punishes himself for putting any kind of hope behind—but if Elias does come for them both together, surely there's a chance they might still be together on the other side.

“Mm?”

Jon looks over. Martin’s looking at him, mouth open, hair mussed on one side. The streetlight illuminates his ruddy cheeks. Indulging himself with a careful look, Jon reaches across and gently tugs the map out of Martin’s grasp. “Nearly there,” he says with a smile in his voice. “Forgotten the turn.”

Eyes bleary, Martin studies Jon in hazy silence. 

“Did you sleep?” Jon asks. “Rather, did you sleep _well?_ I never seem to sleep well anymore.”

With a strange finality, as though reaching a conclusion, Martin looks ahead without saying a word.

Martin’s never been much of a morning person. He usually came into work subdued, used to stumble through Jon’s office for coffee with barely a glance when he lived in the back room. It seems different this time, but it’s best to press on. He holds the unfolded map against the dash and reverse-engineers them back to the turn. 

The map takes them down an unpaved road, leafless trees silhouetted in a brightening sky. Jon takes the road at an unhurried pace. A school sprawls on the left, giving way to a field; tractors and farm houses, then thickening brush. Vast, grassy fields expand on either side, verdant and muddied in the late-autumn rains. Sheep farms, Jon guesses, given the state of the grass. 

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Jon says to draw him out, but Martin says nothing. The road roughens, wending around a hill. Faster than fifteen miles an hour and they risk a flat tire. Martin watches the trees pass with a blank expression. 

It worries Jon, but he has to focus on the road. He doesn’t want to ask questions, but he doesn’t know what else to do. He’s followed Basira’s instructions down to the letter, but this doesn’t seem right; gradually the road all but disappears. He must have missed a turn back—

“There,” Martin says, pointing at a mossy tree. His voice is rough; a rusted mailbox sits nailed to the bark. _Fletcher,_ it says, the name barely visible in the dawn. Jon’s heart quickens all the same; there, indeed. 

He makes the next left down a road yet more obscured. Stalks of weed brush at the undercarriage of the car, a thousand muffled screams. He wouldn’t have known this was here if not for Basira’s specific instructions—they are well away, the road only marked by the high bushes on either side of the brush. 

The drive ends abruptly, opening to a small field—they’re here. They made it. Jon puts the car into park—

Martin’s out the door before Jon catches his eye.

Jon turns with faint bewilderment to watch Martin dig their bags out from the back seat. Jon tries to think up a way to ask without asking if he’s alright, but instead feels weighed down, something lodged in his chest. 

Safety is meant to feel better than this. A suggestion of a structure sits off to the right, obscured by branches and leaves. At a glance, Jon would guess the cabin had not been tended to in months, maybe years. Moss and damp clings to the greyed wooden slats. He shudders to think of the mould encroaching inside. Martin lifts the bags up one at a time and sets off without even looking back.

 _Where has he gone?_ Of course, he’s right there. What a strange thing to think. Jon scrambles after him, the space between them impenetrably vast. Something isn’t right. Does his monstrosity show? Has Martin woken up not to recognize him, Jon’s sheen of humanity having finally fallen away? He can’t ask. He follows Martin at a distance, realizing his alleged conversational tactics will do nothing here. He wants to ask a question; he has to; he can’t. 

It’s not that Martin’s hard to see. It’s that Jon’s gaze slides away from him, lands on anything else. 

Martin sets the bags down. There’s a slat of wood leaned over the door. Jon jogs to catch up, and together they move it to the cabin’s other side. Someone had tried to hide the place, cover it in branches, but wind and time knocked them aside. Surrounded by trees, the cabin’s hardly visible; Jon isn’t worried. 

It will be a pain to walk up here from the village. The road had taken them half up the hill. Maybe they can walk the other way sometimes, if Martin ever looks at him again; see if there’s a path to the hill’s peak. They can look down on Dufftown, surveil the…

Perhaps not.

Their cosy cabin, their safehouse, their salvation, looks like it might fall apart with a good solid gust—yet despite the exterior, Jon’s expectations are blown. Inside, the cabin is small—smaller than both their flats, but it is secure. Two rooms, plus a tiny bathroom in the back complete with a shower, its fixtures rusting with disuse. In the back room they find a double mattress on a makeshift frame. It takes up almost the whole room, save for a shelf overhead.

Jon prays against vermin, but at a glance it looks fine. The bed is hypothetically large enough to fit them both, if Martin can stand it. There’s a ratty old sofa in the central room—forty years old at least, sagging in the middle, but functional for Jon if he tucks in his legs. There’s even a hob—running water in the kitchenette, though it does come out brown to start. They’ll have to boil it to be safe. 

A light switch suggests there’s a generator somewhere. There’s an icebox in the corner, a few bags of cheap tea stuffed into a pair of stained mugs askance in the cupboard. Two chairs and a small table divides the kitchenette from the rest. A haphazard bookshelf made from planks and bricks sports several ratty paperbacks—thrillers and the like. Plates, bowls, a dented pot; utensils, a sieve. It’s all covered in dust, but with a bit of cleaning the space promises functionality. It could even pass for comfortable with a bit of food and a fire in the hearth.

“Well,” says Jon, peering around as Martin drops their bags. “Better than I expected, to be honest.”

Martin doesn’t reply. He stands over the kitchen sink, hands propped, his back turned.

“I can kip on the sofa, if you—”

“Sure.” Abruptly, Martin crouches down, still without looking back. He fishes something out of his bag. “Whatever you want.”

Whatever _he_ wants? “Well, I… I don’t, actually.” 

“Fine.” He doesn’t seem engaged in the conversation; it’s like talking to a board. The prospect of sharing a bed with a monster is perhaps unappealing, but he thought Martin might at least emote, show something on his face. Even disgust might offer relief.

Jon opens his mouth, but he’s not sure what he wants to say. Apologize for being a monster? For not pulling him out sooner? For not being _better_ , for making a joke? He hadn’t wanted to make a joke; it’d been a solid offer, an opportunity for exit. He’s a hair’s breadth from offering to drive Martin elsewhere, to leave Martin the car. Jon’s got cash. He could walk down to the village, get a room for himself. All Martin has to do is ask.

“Do you want the toothpaste?” Martin asks instead, his back turned. “After I’m done.”

“I…” Jon watches Martin move to the kitchen sink. “Sure.” He stoops in front of his bag, giving Martin an even berth, only to remember his gifted toothbrush is in Martin’s bag and not his own.

As though reading his mind, Martin returns with a click of his tongue. Digs the toothbrush out, slams the package against the table. Retreats again, own toothbrush in hand. It’s only then that Jon realizes he’s moved back several steps himself. 

“Martin, what’s—” But he stops himself. Martin doesn’t even register Jon spoke. It’s a mirror of the past several months, a barrier instated that Jon’s not meant to cross. 

Jon stares after him, but there’s nothing to be done until he trusts himself not to force an answer. He degloves his toothbrush, takes the toothpaste from where Martin’s set it aside, and skirts some invisible barrier on his way into the bathroom. He probably needs the hygiene. His breath must smell of nicotine and stale caffeine. That kiss against the car had been ill-advised. Martin’s plainly a good sport, but Jon’s already a fugitive, a monster, and a murderer to boot. To taste bad as well? No wonder Martin’s avoiding him.

The levity doesn’t distract him. In the kitchenette, Martin finishes up. He drinks from his hand, spits the water out again, shuts off the tap—looks out of the window over the sink, and stills. 

Martin may as well be stone. A white terror grips at Jon’s heart. He doesn’t even seem to breathe as he stares off sightless, pallor dull. As Jon watches, uncomprehending in horror, Martin raises a hand and prods at his face, as though checking to see he’s really there. His ginger stubble glints in the low morning light, and then seems almost to fade.

Jon can suddenly name the look in his eyes: Martin's hunted.

_Something here has gone terribly wrong._

Jon spits out the toothpaste, rinses his mouth. “Martin.”

Martin’s faraway gaze meets Jon’s in the window.

Jon swallows. At least that’s something. All he wants is to storm in there and take Martin by the hand, but something seems to be holding him back. “I don’t want to ask you a question. But—”

“Why not?” His voice sounds so removed. 

“Because I don’t want to force an answer.”

“Why not?” He has not turned around. He seems to prefer to look at Jon’s reflection. Jon saw no evidence of monstrosity in the bathroom mirror, but Martin’s always seen things other people do not.

“What do you mean?” Jon asks without thinking—then he swears.

Martin risks a small smile. “Losing battle, I think.”

“I’d like to try.”

He expects Martin to ask him why again, but he only shrugs. His shoulders seem to sit strangely on his frame. Concern in them, maybe? Rounded with pain?

“Please tell me what’s wrong,” Jon says. “Is it me? Am I—”

Martin shuts his eyes hard, both hands bracing him on the counter. Jon’s stomach drops, but his feet seem rooted in place.

“How did you find me?” Martin asks. His head hangs between his shoulders, out of Jon’s sight. “In the Lonely.”

He asked the same thing in the car, but there’s a weight to it now. “I told you, Elias—”

“Elias.” Martin’s voice is so quiet. He sounds so far away. “Once you were inside, Elias—”

“Elias only showed me the door, he wasn’t… there.”

Martin turns to Jon then. Jon startles at the look on his face. “Then how,” Martin says, “did you find me?”

“I just…”

“You just—knew.”

“Yes. I know it’s not—” 

“As though by _magic_.”

Suddenly it occurs to Jon what Martin’s implying. “No. No, it wasn’t like that.”

“Then what was it like?”

It turns out that Martin looking directly at him does nothing to assuage Jon’s fear. “In the car,” Jon says, voice dry—“you seemed to think it was… You said no one else could have done it, that no one else could have found you there.”

“And you said Elias showed you the way.”

“In. Only in. I don’t know how I found you once I was in there, Martin, I…” Jon runs a panicked hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. It’s a sorry answer, I know, but it wasn’t the—”

“It’s alright.” Something in Martin’s abruptly softened voice gives Jon the impression he’s being comforted. “It’s alright, Jon. It doesn’t have to change everything.”

“It doesn’t change anything.”

“I suppose I’m only just figuring out what it means, what you said before.” Martin laughs without humour, hands tight with agony. “That it… that Elias wants me. I get it now, I understand. And I just want you to know you’re off the hook.”

“Off the…? I don’t want to be off the hook.”

“It’s alright, Jon. You don’t have to—”

“It’s not alright!”

“—pretend anymore.”

“I’m not pretending. Martin—”

Martin looks so abruptly out the window that Jon feels certain something’s lurking beyond. “You don’t have to be kind anymore.” Martin won’t look at him again. “You’ve already done… I appreciate what you’ve done, for me. No matter the reason. Now you can go, you can—”

“I’m not being kind, I’m being honest. It wasn’t Elias that found you there, it was me. Or maybe you, Martin, why won’t you—”

Martin lets out another thin laugh, so papery it strikes fear into Jon’s heart. He doesn’t like Martin resigned. Martin’s supposed to be the believer between them. “Spare me, Jon.”

“Spare you—what? My affection? The truth? You asked me a question and now you won’t take the answer. The Beholding had nothing to do with my finding you, not once I was in there. It _can’t._ It has no reach in other domains, it can’t—”

“Bullshit.” Quiet, but sure. “I can take a lot, but I won’t take you lying to me.”

“I’m not _lying_ to you. In the Lonely—I didn’t feel anyone at all, Martin. I didn’t feel you, or Elias. I didn’t even feel Peter when he was standing in front of me. I—” Jon hadn’t wanted to say all of this, hadn’t wanted Martin to get the wrong impression—hadn’t wanted to admit that he wasn’t enough; but he wasn’t. “I don’t know how I found you. Whether Peter led me to you, or if it was you—”

“ _Peter led you to me._ That’s what you want me to believe?”

“Either that, or—”

“What kind of sense does that make? Why would he _do_ that for me?” Martin’s belief in the Lonely is stronger than his belief in Jon right now. “Why do you think—”

Martin stops himself, but compulsion lurches in its wake. Strangely enough, it makes Jon smile. 

“Do you see now why I didn’t want to ask?” he asks softly, and when Martin doesn't reply—“I’ll answer anything you want.”

Martin paces frantically, fingers tight against his lips. “It's just... It is audacious of you, Jon, to stand there and try to convince me that my own patron—”

“Your _patron_?" Jon had been committed to hearing Martin out, but there are some things he won't let stand. "That thing wasn’t your _patron,_ Martin, he would have destroyed you. He would have—he’d have taken everything that makes you…" Jon fixes a hand in his own hair. "He would have made you like him. Not a man, but a thing that preys upon… I broke him into his basest parts to make sure he would never come anywhere near you again. He would have taken the things that make you _away_. He almost… had you, Martin.” Jon’s voice drags thin. “He was your _captor_ , tell me you understand that. He didn’t care about you.”

“He wouldn’t have made me like him," Martin says. "He wouldn’t have liked the company.”

It occurs to Jon then that _Martin_ might have cared.

“Peter wanted to break me,” Jon tells him. “He wanted to claim me, keep me in the Lonely as he would have kept you. He was trying to convince me you were already gone, that you wanted to be there. I said I wanted to hear it from you, and there you were. How? I don’t know. How did I find you?” Jon shrugs desperately. “I wish I had an answer. I wandered for… a while, Martin, I was in there a long time. Hours, I think, trying to find you on my own. And I wish that I had, but I… didn’t. I didn't have the Eye, I simply couldn’t use it. We’ve found each other in these places before—”

“How did you kill him?”

Jon was hoping he wouldn’t ask, but the words push persistently at the front of his mouth. Martin’s strong when there’s something he needs to know. 

“I compelled him to answer my question, and he refused. So I tried to rip it out of him.” Jon knows he sounds cavalier, but he can’t pretend to be sorry. “I guess I misfired.”

In a just and reasoned world, Martin would greet the news that Jon’s a cold-blooded killer with the remonstration it deserves. But he holds Jon's gaze, searching. “What did you ask him?”

Another tug in it, less sure than it was. “Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t about you.”

“It was about you. Wasn’t it?”

So Martin already knows. He just wants Jon to say it. “I wanted him to tell me what Elias has planned for me.”

“That’s why you…”

Jon doesn’t know what he means, but takes a stab in the dark. “I was just trying to keep you safe. I don’t have all the answers.”

“Did you kill Peter—for me?”

Jon doesn’t even have to think. “Yes.” 

He waits again for the accusations he’s earned. To have killed Peter in his own domain—Jon must be a million times worse. Even Jon himself no longer has a grasp on the limits of his abilities. There are things within him even he can’t control. 

Martin stays silent. Out of sheer terror, Jon talks instead. “The only thing that mattered, more than everything else, was getting to you. Don’t you see? I could have… I could have done a thousand things, Martin, I could have—” He’s not saying this well. “The _Beholding_ isn’t what drove me to you—because that’s not why I was looking. If Elias wanted you, he could have found you himself.”

“So you just, you just—” Sniffling, Martin waves a frantic hand. “You just—you want me to believe that—that what, Jon, that you somehow, _Avatar_ , that you—that _love_ is more powerful than… That _love_ saved me? Is that what you want me to believe? For all your power, for all your—”

“But you found _me_ , Martin, that’s what I’m trying to say. It wasn’t me at all— _you_ didn’t want to be lost.” Jon feels so sure. His fingers curl against the doorframe, desperate to reach out. “ _You_ didn’t.”

“But I did,” Martin whispers.

“Not more than you wanted to be here. Please, Martin, just let me come closer, I—” But Martin’s body moves away when Jon toes forward, as though pulled by strings. “Alright. Just listen to me. The Beholding can’t find us in other domains. I did everything in my power to give myself a way out of the Buried, didn’t I? I made myself an anchor, I… but it wasn’t enough. I was stuck there, even in spite of the Beholding, until you put the tapes— _you_ , Martin, _you_ did this, it was you that pulled me out. I can tell you what I felt like—it felt like an anchor. I felt the same thing in the Lonely when you came into view. I’ve been trying for months to be an anchor for you, but I’d swear it was you who found me. I'd swear it.”

“You...” Martin swallows. “Months?”

“I’ve been doing everything I can to try to reach you, but I—it’s like now, Martin, it’s—I can’t get to you, unless you let me. I, I keep thinking about Gerard Keay, something he said, how avatars can only be shaped by fear. But he—he knew better, didn’t he? He knew _something_ about what fights it, because he told Andrea Nunis to think of her mother. Her encounter with the Lonely—and she _survived_ , Martin, she survived it because—because of that anchor. I think that’s what it is, I think that’s how you get out. You think of someone you—” Jon cuts off with a pang. “Martin, please, you have to let me close to you now.”

This is the devastation Jon’s expected to see: tears brimming over, Martin's chest contracting with a breath he can’t take. He can’t be alone in this, he can’t—Jon takes a terrified step. 

Martin turns away, but it’s not how it was. Whatever’s kept them apart is gone now, gone from the room. There’s nothing stopping Jon now from stepping near, from grasping at Martin’s sleeve—from pulling at his shoulder and drawing him into his arms.

Martin tries to hide in shame, but Jon won't let him. “I’m here,” he says; it’s all he has left to give. “Martin, I’m here.”

Fingers contorting in the front of Jon’s shirt, Martin's head bows, shoulders bent in agony. Jon slides a hand at the back of his neck, coaxing him near—there, a minute concession, a give, a lean in. 

“I’m here,” Jon says again, in case it counts—and Martin’s breath shudders out on a sob.

From there, it's easy to get Martin near. One gentle pull and Martin buries his face at his collar. “This is what the Lonely does,” Jon mutters at his brow, wrapping his arms tight. “It makes you think I don’t love you, but I do, and I will. I know there’s comfort in the familiar path, but it isn’t true anymore, Martin, and you mustn’t believe it. You’re not alone anymore. I swear on my life I won’t leave you alone.”

Jon’s voice withers under the weight of its implication. He means it, it’s true, he plans never to leave—but if Jon’s condemned to Elias that means Martin is, too. There’s no avoiding it now.

If Martin knows it, he doesn’t seem to mind. His posture adjusts, fist clenching at Jon’s back.

Light creeps slowly into the room, sun breaking through the trees in fractal shards. In the feeble light of the breaking dawn, Jon tucks Martin’s head under his chin. He is relieved, beyond it, just to be able to take Martin in his arms—to plant his feet in the ground and anchor him to the material plane. Let the Lonely find them now. Let it try to pry Martin from his bestial hands and be torn asunder. 

“Bad luck you’ve managed to involve yourself with someone who can barely articulate himself on affection,” Jon manages when they’ve swayed there a while; Martin buries half a sob, half a laugh into Jon’s chest. “Have to get better at it.”

Martin presses his eyes against Jon’s shirt in turns. “They say it takes upwards of ninety repetitions to learn things,” he rasps.

“Best get on it then.”

“Yeah, you’d better.”

They make motions to disentangle but don’t quite manage it—there’s too much caught up in the moment, too much they haven’t said. Neither one of them is much versed in letting things go, and it seems absurd to start now. Jon guides Martin’s face gently against his throat, burying his nose in Martin’s hair.

“Believe me,” Jon mutters, shutting his eyes. “Believe me.”

It’s a strange sentiment, but it seems to work. Martin nods silently, fingers clenching in Jon’s shirt. Slowly, limbs shaking, Martin pulls slowly away, sniffing horribly, holding his sleeve under his nose.

Jon pulls a handkerchief from a trouser pocket. “It’s clean.”

Martin gives him an odd look, but takes it anyway, mopping his face. “You just carry around a clean handkerchief?” he rasps.

“Tissues count as a flammable source.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Martin mutters over Jon’s faint laugh. “Your tissue vendetta is easily in the top five most insane things you’ve ever done.”

“It is not top five.”

“First was arguing that _paper_ was a flammable material, before you realized what you sounded like. At what point did ‘tissues’ seem like a bigger fire risk than smoking in the alcove behind the—”

“I never did that, that was spurious slander.”

“No it wasn’t! You just wanted a sprinkler system installed.”

Martin notices because he notices, not because he needs to know. Jon loves him for that. With a strange hit of possessiveness, Jon slips a finger just into Martin’s sleeve. 

“Stop that,” Martin says, mopping up his face.

“Let me.” For all Martin’s nominally pulled himself together, moisture keeps gathering at the corners of his eyes, subdued hitches punctuate his breath. Jon doesn’t like leaving him with it, raises a thumb to brush away a tear.

Martin swats at his hand. “Stop it.”

“Just—let me, for once.”

“You want to clean up my sopping face?” Martin asks incredulously, but Jon answers only by cupping Martin’s jaw—by stepping close, leaning in, resting his brow near to his and breathing in deep.

Martin curls a hand around Jon’s wrist and holds him there; a tilt and lean, and Jon’s braced Martin against the counter. They stand there, noses flush, until Jon draws in a slow breath, and Martin gets the idea and matches the pace. 

Jon had no idea if this was going to work when he did it, but Martin’s breath does settle; a tight, abrupt inhale, a shaking breath out, and soon Jon stops brushing the tears out of his eyes. Martin’s thumb scans gently against Jon’s wrist; there begins a low pull; Jon tilts his head forward and catches his lips.

Martin’s breath stutters. Jon almost regrets the decision, until Martin’s hand pulls tighter against his wrist. 

“You should eat,” Jon says against his lips.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You might sleep some more. I can—”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

“Well.” Jon can’t rephrase everything. If he must ask a question, let it be this. “What do you want, Martin?”

A hint of a smile on Martin's lips. “You know what I want.”

“I want to hear you say it.”

So Martin pulls Jon's head down, puts his lips to his ear—and tells him.

  



	4. (epilogue.)

  


**epilogue.**

  
Martin wakes to Jon brushing a strand of hair out of his eyes: the first snapshot of the afternoon.

Next—Jon’s hastened apology for waking him up. Martin’s quick ensnaring of Jon’s limbs between his. A definitive effort to draw Jon into him like a creature from the deep, Jon acquiescing, a languid kiss. Jon’s fingers tight in his hair, Jon shifting under Martin’s form—a reversal from the morning, when Jon had kneeled over Martin and given him pleasure while saying his name. 

Jon shoves his feet under Martin’s shins. Martin, transfixed, pulls Jon’s head back by the hair. He is responsive. It is nice to see him stunned into quiet. A breathless exchange: “We should get you some food,” followed Martin’s vague agreement mouthed against his throat; a long bit of necking; Jon’s low, reluctant sounds of wanting, the way he pulls Martin closer still. “This is not town,” Jon says again; another murmured agreement before Martin’s mouth works a mark just under Jon’s jaw. 

A brief accounting of Jon’s pleasure: how it echoes through Martin. Jon’s hitching breath, his quiet sounds, the give and take of his body, how he leans into what he wants. The way it feels strange in Martin’s body, foreign in its scope. Jon is not as shy of physicality of Martin might have thought, but Martin’s impulse now is to take Jon into his arms and make the kind of love that collapses the bed.

That’s not what Jon wants. What Jon wants is exactly this, so he gives Jon all the rugged tenderness he wants. Brushes a thumb against the mark he’s already left as he bites another, slides a hand under Jon’s back; smiles to feel Jon arch against him. Laughs when Jon’s fingers pull too hard in his hair. Breathy apologies. The rush he gets from Jon’s quiet moans. How soon it turns to kissing again, whole and consuming. How different it feels when the kissing’s the point. No hidden motive, no chasing of _more_ —only this, only them. 

Martin hadn’t known it could be like this.

“To town, then,” Martin says against his lips, not really thinking of town at all. Jon’s muttered, nonsense agreement; the way he rolls Martin onto his back, the slow slide of Jon’s mouth down Martin’s body. The way his palms find his legs, his quiet rebuke when Martin objects. “You don’t have to—”

“Shut up, Martin.” Jon’s mouth at his hip, the inside of his thigh, and Martin gives up, gives in, gives over—the bedframe shudders after all.

There’s an odd benevolence to what Jon does for him, these acts of pleasure Martin can’t return. Martin struggles with it. A pall passes over the room as Jon slips out of bed. He’s saying something about trying the shower, maybe there’s a generator, has he tried the hot water at all? 

Martin has not. He guesses from the sound of displeasure a minute later—Jon has not closed the bathroom door; intriguing—that Jon has not yet figured it out. 

Lying there, languishing in a fathoms-deep pit of sex guilt, Martin tries to force himself to suppose there is hot water tank buried somewhere on the property.

The lack of responding desire had been plainly writ on Jon’s body, and now he is now literally taking a cold shower. 

It’s fine. It’s fine. Jon told him this; Martin shouldn’t be surprised. He rolls out of bed and gathers his clothes, waits for Jon to step out. Jon does step out, looking gently drowned.

He’s still chatting away. Jon talks when he’s nervous, but he doesn’t seem upset at the very least. He kisses Martin as he passes, a hand resting at his hip, and that feels right; that feels natural. Martin tastes toothpaste in Jon’s mouth.

“Are you, erm,” Martin says, voice too high. “Are you fine?”

“Yes,” Jon says in a bewildered sort of way. He looks almost like he wants to follow up, but he shuts his mouth instead. “Yes, I’m fine. Are you…?”

“Yes!” Bravely saving Jon from a forbidden question, Martin steps into the shower himself. The water is—frigid. It’s almost nice, in a way, nice and shocking. A hard reset to the system is just what he needs.

Martin gasps and stands under the stream a while, pressing his forehead to the plastic wall. This is fine, he tells himself. Literally nothing at all is wrong. You are _making_ a problem, Martin Blackwood, this is—

“There’s a towel on the doorknob,” Jon calls over the water, and Martin chokes on a laugh. By all rights, he should be the happiest man in the world.

  


  


  


Martin manages marginally higher spirits as he walks into town with Jon. They had considered the car but decided to walk, preferring not to be in it again so soon. The day is pleasant enough; the leaves have been steadily ripped off the trees by a stinging autumn wind, which makes them glad they’d collected their coats. Jon’s long hair dances in the breeze, a life of its own.

“You seem relaxed,” Martin says. It’s true. Jon’s shoulders have lost their usual tension; he seems constantly about to smile.

“Yes."

“I meant, er—you don’t seem as worried about Elias.”

Jon hesitates, looks over the field. "I don’t think he’s coming just yet.”

“Oh?” Oh God. “What does that mean?”

“Only…” A hint of a smile, a melancholy thing. “Only, Martin, that I think we might get a bit of time.”

Martin takes this in stride. “Quiet before the storm, d’you think?”

“Something like that.” Then he frowns and cranes his neck. “Was that a cat over there?” 

Jon sets off before Martin can answer. By the time Martin catches up to him, he finds Jon down on his haunches, clicking his tongue with his fingers outstretched.

The cat—a grey and mangy thing, clearly a stray—had been looking at Jon with wary interest, but ran away on Martin’s approach. Before Martin can apologize, Jon’s already straightened, troubled. “Half-starved,” he mutters.

Martin looks at him with bewilderment. “I didn’t know you liked cats.”

“Grew up with one,” Jon admits. “My grandmother liked them. I adopted one with Georgie, too, though the custody agreement was clear from the first after we split up. The Admiral, he’s called—lovely creature. Though don’t tell him I said that, I’ll never live it down.”

Martin laughs, faintly awed. “Would you have one again?”

Jon hums in contemplation. “I don’t know.” Strangely, he gives Martin an anxious glance. “Some people are allergic.”

“Oh? Like who?”

“Well… you, maybe? I don’t know. I know you like dogs, I don’t know about cats.”

“Oh.” Martin feels like the wind’s been knocked out of him. “No, I… I’m not allergic.”

“I’m not much for dogs.”

“That’s alright.” Martin’s heart is in his throat. “I like cats. I even had a cat growing up.”

“Did you! What was his name?”

“Er—Cat? No! Coltrane. I called him Cat though. Little ginger lad, quality mouser. Shouldn’t say little, really; he was a tank. We didn’t have him very long. Smaller cat might’ve fared better.”

Jon looks at him sharply. “Why not?”

“Well. I mean…” Martin shrugs. “I wasn’t behaving, so.”

Jon’s silence is bracing; he stops dead in the middle of the gravel road. “Your father took your cat away—because you misbehaved?”

“Well…”

Jon seems suddenly to have forgotten his embargo on questions. “And you’re sure you don’t want me to find him?”

“Ha… no.”

“Because I can.”

“What are you going to do, tear him to pieces over a cat?”

Jon deflates, retreating into himself, and Martin feels awful at once. “God, I didn’t mean… I just mean please don’t find him. He’s not worth it, not for this or any reason.”

With a nod, Jon reaches out and squeezes Martin’s hand. It makes Martin feel warm. He’s getting better at that, little gestures and such. “I know,” Jon says with a small smile. “Nevermind.”

They walk in silence the rest of the way.

  


  


  


The market turns out to be a protracted affair. Martin beelines for the usual aisles and collects his usual meals, only for Jon to look at him, horrified. “Oh, I think not.”

“I do need to eat.”

“You—” But Jon rolls his eyes at himself, rearranging the sentence.

“You can ask me a question,” Martin says.

“I take it you don’t cook.”

“I’m not worried about secrets.”

“One thing at a time.” He brandishes a can of ravioli menacingly in the air.

“Why on earth would I cook? Dinner for one?”

“One of life’s little pleasures.”

“Ravioli’s good.”

Jon gives him a look. “I’ll cook.”

“Can… you?”

“Of course I can.”

“But you don’t… I only mean that…” Martin laughs nervously. “ _You_ don’t have to eat.” 

“Well, I’m certainly not going to watch you eat cold ravioli out of a can.”

“I’d heat it up first.”

This does nothing to appease him. “I think not,” Jon says again, and he sets off with the cart, incensed.

Martin, baffled, hurries after to the produce. “ _You_ ," he says, "bachelor of the year for five years running, know how to cook.”

“I learned growing up,” Jon says simply. “I was a picky eater and then decided to flirt with vegetarianism as a teenager on top of it. Understandably, my grandmother grew tired of my food trends and I took over the task. Came to quite enjoy it, actually. She…” He waves a hand. “She didn’t ask to raise me. It was the least I could do. As I say, it’s hardly gourmet, but cooking’s hard to get bored with, as hobbies go. Always something new to try.” Inexplicably, Jon sniffs an orange. “I can teach you if you like, but if you prefer to languish in culinary mediocrity, I won’t be offended. To the contrary, in fact; I…” He hesitates, looking shy. “If you’d let me—I think I’d rather enjoy it.”

“I—I mean,” Martin says, sputtering a laugh, “I won’t say no. But I don’t want to be a burden—”

“You couldn’t possibly,” Jon says, and places the orange into the trolley.

Martin resigns himself to simply following Jon through the store, pulling his scarf away from his neck. It’s warm in here, suddenly. He feels a bit like a lost puppy, watching Jon drop ingredients into the trolley without any understanding of what he might make. It occurs to him eventually they can’t use their cards, but Jon pays for the groceries from a shocking wad of cash. 

“How long have you been planning this?” Martin asks, taking another grocery bag out of Jon’s hands. “Running away into the wilderness.”

“Weeks, at least. I did ask you—”

“And you just carried that around with you every day in case I came around.”

“Well... I hoped. Give that back.”

“You’re paying _and_ cooking, you won’t carry as well.”

“This isn’t a transaction, Martin—” But Martin puts on a bit of speed and Jon might have long legs, but he doesn’t have Martin’s strength. Martin has to slow down to let Jon catch up down the street.

About halfway home, rooting through one of the bags, Jon tears the lid off a tin of cat food and leaves it by the road. “I’ll keep an eye out for you,” he tells the air; but realizing how it sounds, Jon purses his mouth and for a moment looks miserably sad—a look on his face Martin's sure he's never seen before—and straightens his collar against the wind.

  


  


  


“What do you like to eat?”

An hour or two later, Martin’s sitting in a kitchen chair watching Jon cook, his chin in his hand. They spent a harrowing forty minutes trying to figure out the generator, but now there's light and the hob is running and there’s a fire in the hearth. Martin’s not sure when he’s felt this glad. “Hm?”

“Apart from canned ravioli,” Jon asks, “what do you like?”

Martin raises his brows. “Asking me questions now, are you?”

“It’s a losing battle,” he admits wearily. “If I compel you on the subject of food, I beg you to forgive me.”

“I already told you I don’t have secrets from you.”

“You have a right to your own…” He waves a hand. “I won’t force the issue, but it’s not natural to speak without questions, you’re right. I want to know about you, I just…” He shuts his eyes, gesturing in the air. “I’m trying to balance some things.”

“Don’t hurt yourself.” Jon smiles at the barb. Martin feels flush with awe watching Jon work—he used to watch it all the time, fascinated with his method. He’s so mentally organized. It’s no different when he cooks. “I suppose I like almost everything. I am rather fond of curries.”

“Good. What else?”

“I don’t know? Anything, really. I’m not being self-deprecating, I’m just not particular. I like a good pie. When I was a kid, my mum made this pork cutlet and apple thing…”

“You’d like that?”

“You don’t have to.”

Jon frowns at the hob. “Might be out of our capabilities here.”

“Well, I… hob meals are more than enough. I never got on especially well with aubergine, I don’t think, but apart from that everything else is…” He peers at Jon, hesitating. “You’re not making aubergine….?”

“No. Tuscan chicken.”

“Oh, my God." Martin's already embarrassed. "But… you said nothing fancy.”

“It’s not.”

“But that’s—a whole meal. You order that at a restaurant.”

“You order pasta at a restaurant. That doesn’t mean it’s hard to make.”

“But there’s tomatoes, and—”

“That’s the idea. Tell me how you like this.” And Jon turns toward him, hand poised under a spoon.

Martin pouts at him, but he tastes the sauce. It tastes wonderful, creamy and rich. 

“Jon,” he says faintly, but Jon’s turned back again, and in ten minutes’ time he serves dinner with flourish, holding a small portion back for himself.

It’s hard to swallow around the lump in his throat, but Martin does his level best. Jon watches him savour it, obviously pleased. “Do you like it?” he asks.

Martin swallows before managing a response. “It’s… incredible.”

“I think I can try a curry tomorrow. It’ll be a bit packaged, I’ve never been able to get it right otherwise—”

“Jon, you really—” Martin’s throat stings again. “You really don’t have to... do all of this. This is incredible as it is, I—I don’t want you to—”

“But I want to, Martin. I’ve been saying: let me.”

Comprehension strikes him so suddenly that Martin feels briefly faint. “Oh,” he says, and tries to hide his face.

“Oh,” Jon says. “I’ve upset you.”

“No.”

“Martin.”

“No, I…” But Martin’s throat betrays him by closing completely.

Jon pats himself down, a bit frantic. “I haven’t got any more handkerchiefs to give you, I'm afraid.”

Martin laughs thickly, wiping his eyes with his sleeves. “What else d’you want to give me, then? An ocean? The moon?”

“If you want it. Oh, that’s made it worse. Stop crying, Martin—no, I don’t mean that, do what you like. Now you’re laughing. You’ve got me at a disadvantage here, I… Would you like some dessert? Dessert might help. I had something in mind involving oranges and cream, but I—Martin—I can’t tell if I’m—are you _happy_?” Jon gives a sigh at Martin’s nod, a hand splayed over his chest. “You’re happy. Alright.”

It’s hard not to love Jon for that, but it’s a much greater effort not to give him a hard time. “Do you always panic about feelings?”

“Only about half the time.” Decisively, Jon turns on his heel and disappears round the corner. “Have to make do with loo roll—”

“There’s tissues in the bedroom,” Martin says, and Jon immediately beelines to fetch them. He plops them on the table, presses a firm kiss to Martin’s brow, then spins away again. 

“Good,” he says, throwing a towel over his shoulder. “Excellent.”

“You won’t do the washing up,” Martin says, blowing his nose.

“Get it out of the way.”

“Stop it.” But Jon studiously won’t look at him. “Oh, come now, you weren’t this embarrassed yesterday.”

“I understood, yesterday.” Jon fills the kettle with water, pours some soap into the sink.

“You’re not going to do everything. Don’t be ridiculous, I’ll make the tea—Jon. Enough. I’m washing up. No, shut up, I love you too”—Jon gives him a faintly startled smile—“but go away. Lie down, read a book, you like those.”

If reluctantly, Jon does as he’s told. Martin returns to his dinner in pensive silence. He can’t think the last time someone made him a meal who wasn’t paid to do it—he might’ve been 16 and sick with the flu, his mum bringing canned soup with a slew of complaints.

Martin tidies with meditative purpose, enjoying the silence in the room. Logs crackle in the fire, damp with mildew and rain. He’s never smelled anything like it before. He went camping with his granddad once when he was little; he remembers being afraid of monsters in the trees, only for Granddad to tell him they were friendly giants looking over the land.

Maybe that’s why he feels safe here—the trees and the giants and Jon’s competent hands. Only once he’s finished tidying up does Martin glance behind him to see what those hands are doing. Jon's stretched out on the sofa, ankles propped over one other on the far arm, his tall black socks disappearing into his trousers. He’s frowning at one of Daisy’s paperback thrillers, glasses propped on his brow away from his eyes. Martin had noticed him studying them before they left for town, as though he wasn’t sure what they were for. He’d put them on in the end, but Martin supposes they won’t last long. It could be that he’ll need them again the longer without a statement he’s gone.

He read one this morning. He thinks Martin didn’t notice, but he did. It’s nice Jon’s trying to protect him.

“Can I ask—”

Jon cocks a brow without looking up. “Mm?”

But Martin's courage leaves him there. He shuts his eyes, leaning back against the sink. “I don’t mean anything by it.”

Now he turns over his attention in full, thumb keeping his place between the waterstained pages. “Go on.”

“Is, erm…” Martin looks off, clears his throat. “Does sex… embarrass you?”

“Embarrass?” Jon sounds surprised, but he considers the question. “No, I don’t think so. Not embarrassed, per se.” Then he narrows his gaze, as though intuiting his reason. “I don’t think that’s it.”

“I just thought you don’t like… mess.” Martin gestures vaguely. “The handkerchief, I remembered—I only saw you do it a couple times. You were usually at the office before I came in, but every once in a while you…” He mimes wiping dust off a table.

Humming, Jon props his arm behind his head. “I find mess vexing,” he admits. “Dust has long been my mortal enemy. I may be at war with it to my dying day. But it’s, er… it’s mostly a question of order, Martin. I find mess distracting and unnecessary in a majority of cases. Not really an embarrassment. Sometimes I find it helpful.” Pursing his lips, he gives Martin a strained look. “It’s… perfectly natural, of course.”

In spite of himself, Martin laughs. “That is a logical conclusion.”

“Yes, make your fun. The thing is…”

“It doesn’t turn you _on_.”

“Precisely," he agrees, voice warm. "I’ll admit that own mess dampens my enthusiasm considerably and contributes to why I prefer—not to receive. With others, I like to deal with it quickly, but not for any reason other than that it’s a mild inconvenience. It’s quite useful in the midst, of course. Supports the task at hand. Is that…” Jon hesitates, but asks the question after all. “Is that what’s been on your mind?”

Martin twists the towel in his hands. “It’s just, I just thought… that maybe you prefer not deal with mess at all. And I don’t—”

“No, that’s not it.” Jon gestures to the dishes. “I’ve made a mess making dinner. Does that make the dinner not worth having?”

“Well… no. But—”

“The mess has no benefit to me in and of itself, but that’s not to say the result wasn’t otherwise enjoyable.”

“Okay, but you don’t even—” It’s crucial, suddenly, that Jon understands. “You don’t have to eat, though, Jon.” A fluttering laugh. He’s always laughing when he’s afraid. “You don’t… I just mean I can eat canned. I’ve always eaten canned. It doesn’t… it doesn’t make things worse for us, you know? You don’t have to—”

“But I like to, Martin. I want to do this, I can’t say it enough.”

“I mean that you—you don’t have to _prove_ your love to me, Jon. I feel like I… like I set you up for, for declarative acts, or… but you’ve _said_ you don’t like to, so I—”

“No—no.” Jon props himself up on his elbows, but Martin waves him down again.

“I only don’t want you to think that you—must.”

“I don’t think that at all, that’s simply not it. Have I given you some indication that…” Jon pinches his nose. “Alright. I—”

“No, shut up, it’s fine. Nevermind. I just—”

“Earlier, in a particularly vulnerable moment," Jon says in a strange voice, "you said my name.” His embarrassment is plain, but he gestures, as though laying his cards down. “It was all I wanted right then. In all the world, that’s what I wanted to hear. Is that…”

Martin’s cheeks burn fiercely; he presses his hands flat against them. “I get it.”

“I don’t…” Jon gestures uselessly, frustrated by words. “I don’t _want_ you to take care of yourself anymore. That's the whole point. I want it to be me. I want…" He clicks his tongue. "Christ, I hate love!” He says it so savagely that it startles Martin into a laugh. “No, I don’t mean that, I—I hate the language of it. It isn't enough. It’s not enough to just say the words. I’m trying to _show_ you.”

“I get it, I get it. It’s just… I’ve been a pity fuck plenty of times before. I never want to be that for you. I'm just saying you don’t have to—”

“Martin,” Jon says firmly, holding out an arm, “come here.”

For a moment, some unseen force tosses its head and tries to hold him back. _This is not for you to know,_ a voice says in his head—but strangely, that’s what tells him it is. The Lonely’s known for telling lies. There lies Jon, Jon and his furious words and his piercing gaze and his stupid glasses sat up on his head, and Jon— _Jon_ —loves him in this moment and into the next. He looks at Martin with new expressions, new smiles and new sadnesses now; these are for him. Jon looks at him and sees a person worth saving. Jon looks at him and gives of himself.

This is meant for him. It has to be, for him to be so scared.

He understands now why Jon’s been so afraid of his feelings in this. There’s something cosmic in the fact that, in the middle of a living hell, they've managed to build something worth running away for. 

Martin pushes off the counter, throwing the towel in the sink, and lets Jon take him into his waiting arms. 

It’s a complicated process. Jon shifts as Martin rests his head against his chest. It's an awkward thing, but they make it work, Martin's ear against his chest.

“Sorry,” Martin whispers, wrapping his hands under Jon’s ribs.

“You don’t have to be.” There are times when Jon chooses his words so carefully that Martin aches. It’s never, ‘Don’t be sorry,’ or, ‘You shouldn’t be’—it’s that he wishes it wasn’t so. That Martin didn’t have to feel this way. “You are not a 'pity fuck'.”

He enunciates these last words so deliberately that it makes Martin laugh. “Okay.”

“I like getting to know you. Please let me.”

“You might have to keep telling me this.”

“That’s fine.” 

Martin listens to the beat of Jon’s steady heart. Baboom. Baboom. “Go back to reading.”

Jon sighs. He holds the book aloft. “It’s not bad.”

“You don’t have to sound so unhappy about it.”

“It’s just… well. It’s a bit—”

“You know why people go on vacations, Jon? To read terrible books and be one with the wilderness. You might give it a go.”

“Yes. Our forced vacation to northern Scotland on the eve of winter has me positively blossoming in the potential for relaxation.”

He can't help it; Martin smiles at the acid in Jon's voice. “Is it so bad as all that?”

“No,” Jon says, his voice turning soft, pulling his fingers through Martin's hair. “It’s not bad at all.” And as Jon flips back in his book and reads to Martin aloud—that throaty cadence Martin's gotten to know so well—Martin finally starts to believe, here in their cosy cabin, that he might not be alone.

  



End file.
